CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 



AND 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 



By NEAL BROWN 



THE PHILOSOPHER PRESS 

WAUSAU WISCONSIN 



^u 



the library cf 
congress, 


Two Copies 




JAN IS 


190? 


Copyright 


Entry 


CLASS Ct 


XXc. No. 


COPY 


B. 






COPYRIGHTED 1899 By NEAL BROWN 
COPYRIGHTED 1902 By NEAL BROWN 

FIRST EDITION DECEMBER 1899 
SECOND EDITION DECEMBER 1902 



CONTENTS 

ANDREW LANG .... 

HONORE DE BALZAC ... 

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 
DEGENERATION . 

JOHN SMITH 

A DEFERRED CRITICISM . 
AMERICAN NOTES . 
AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 
JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES . 



9 

22 

29 

60 

95 

136 

158 

174 

193 



ANDREW LANG 

IN pessimistic mood, one feels that the world 
of letters has squandered most of its genius, 

and is traveling toward an intellectual 
poorhouse. The great poets have certainly 
departed. Stevenson has gone, and there are 
but two or three story-tellers left. Fiction has 
become short and choppy; a matter of 
fragments, without sustained flights. The few 
mountain peaks that are left are nodding. The 
fruits of letters seem over-ripe and ready to fall 
rotting to the ground. It is a transition time, 
and perhaps the soil is being fertilized by the 
rank growths that spring up, for something 
better to come. 

We are seduced from healthy standards by 
fin de siecle tendencies ; the colour of nature is 
gone, and we have green carnations and 
unsubstantial, unreal things. Men are made 
to seem like shadows walking. We are 
non-creative. We either imitate, or else we 
rebel against imitation, and the pendulum 



10 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

swings as far the other way. The result is 
strange, uncouth, fancies in art and literature, 
and our romancists make monkeys of men, to 
borrow a phrase from the vernacular. The 
commercial autocrats of magazinedom, and 
certain of the hack writers of newspaperdom 
set the fashion. With the small arts of puffery 
they build up small reputations that die in a 
day. How often the announcement ; "agenius 
is coming, watch for him, he is here, — he has 
written a great novel, a great poem, or what 
not." We are put on the qui vive, and by 
and bye when the poor little puffed-out product 
struts upon the stage we find that he belongs 
to the ephemera. These strains are common. 
We watch anxiously for the pool to move that 
we may be healed of these grotesque vagaries 
of mental disease. We gaze longingly up the 
road for a rescuer and see but wind-piled 
columns of choking dust. 

We comfort ourselves a little with Kipling ; 
and Besant and Black are still with us, but we 
sigh to be healed of Hardy's decadence, and of 
the tastelessness of The Martian — poor 
withered fruit of DuMaurier's dotage. 

We cry out for something in place of this 
dry rot, this attenuated intellectuality; this 



ANDREW LANG 11 

vain struggling after startling effects. Our 
sensibilities are mangled and scarified day by 
day by the rude contact of a crowd of weird, 
grotesque figures, who flit their fantastic way 
across the stage. 

We are surrounded by writers of queer 
distorted verse, drunken with their own turgid, 
muddy, rhetoric; dancing fauns and satyrs 
holding revels over social uncleanness like crows 
over carrion; dreamers of meaningless visions, 
makers of verse full of incomprehensible 
gibberish. Are they of healthy human kind 
who beat time in this rout? Is that young 
woman who writes tigerish verses of a tigerish 
passion, all the Sappho we shall have? Must 
we call a plain case of erotic mania, poetic 
fervour? Is that jingler of little verselets, that 
journeyman carver of odd forms of speech, to 
be our Tennyson? Shall we force ourselves to 
see deathless harmony in a mere mush of words, 
simply because it is labeled poetry? Must we 
give Jude The Obscure and The Martian 
a place with Vanity Fair and David 
CoPPERPlKLD? We "have been nolled by 
holy bell to church, have sat at good men's 
feasts, " and we cannot forget those feasts. If 
there is nothing else, give us some good stories 



12 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

of bears and tigers, of jungles, of far-off lands 
where men are breathing free, and where there 
is good wholesome blood-letting and killing. 

Thus the Pessimist. 

But we may be comforted in a measure ; 
we have our blessings and must not be 
unmindful of them. Into this world where 
everything is worn out, and steeped in the 
ditch-water of dullness, comes an interrogation 
point of a man — Andrew Lang. If needs be, 
he will smash every idol and question every 
fad. Let the fashions change as they will, here 
is a man who clings to the verities of truth and 
mental good health. 

He is cool-blooded and temperate when 
others are furious. He retains his composure 
amidst the clamours of little coteries of in- 
tellectual starvelings frantically admiring each 
other, and bound to coerce all others into a like 
service. Into this market-place of small wares, 
Lang comes as the Sealer of Weights and 
Measures. He hears unmoved the dingdonging 
of the auction bell, the selling of names. He 
cannot be hypnotized by the posturings and 
caperings of literary mountebanks. Over the 
Kingdom of Fools, he is the upright and just 
judge, with plenary jurisdiction. 



ANDREW- LANG 13 

Many idols, some false and some true, have 
been ranged before this judgment seat. Along 
with other stucco-work, is poor old Poet Bailey, 
the solace and comfort of our grandmothers. 
Look in your Poets' Argosy or Gems of 
Poetry, and you will unearth among other an- 
cient treasures, "O no, We Never Mention Her," 
and like lollipops and sweet things from Bailey. 
I knew Bailey first through the melancholia 
of my friend Mr. Richard Swiveller, who turned 
from the perfidious Sophy to Bailey's soothing 
charm. I learned Bailey better through Lang, 
who treated his reputation charitably, bestowing 
only a spanking — lightly laid on. In fact 
Lang thinks that Bailey might have been 
something of a poet, he pleased so many simple 
folk. In this genial fashion does he judge all 
small sinners. 

But when Lang reads the beadroll of 
genius, names that were before heard and 
forgotten stick like burrs. They stand for 
something. The dead heroes walk again in 
new-kindled light. Bunyan, and Montaigne, 
and Scott, and all great and noble souls gain 
new nobility and pass unscathed through that 
wise and kindly judgment. Lang has the 
grand hailing sign and password of the kinship 



14 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

of genius. He recognizes his fellows for what 
they are across the centuries and the wide 
seas. 

Thus it is that he flashed recognition over 
to Holmes and Lowell, of all Americans the 
most like himself. He discovered Kipling in 
the wilderness of India, and gave him a passport 
into the world of letters. And now Kipling 
has become the man of three continents, with 
fame enough to fill them all. 

Lang is best as a critic and hero worshipper. 
He and Nordau are almost the only ones left to 
police our world of literary nondescripts. Carlyle, 
that harsh block of Scottish granite is gone, 
and humbug and cant may thrive apace. 
Thackeray, Keeper of a House for the Correction 
of Snobs, stalks his grim beat no more. 
Macaulay, who so deftly put Mr. Robert Mont- 
gomery in the pillory, is with the dust of the 
earth. Dr. Holmes, vested with large jurisdic- 
tion over vulgar pretenders in these American 
Colonies, has no further judgments to execute. 
They are no more. Gallant spirits, loyal to 
the truth, when shall we look upon your like 
again ! You yet have some security that your 
work will be carried on, for Lang is your living 
disciple. You may be sure that some frothy 



ANDREW LANG IS 

cant will be sponged out; some humbugs will 
be dosed heroically; some literary reputations 
will be put in the stocks where we may all have 
our fling at them. Who shall say that these 
labours have been in vain? The snobs did not 
run about at ease while Thackeray was at 
them. Some of them were killed and some 
cured. 

Where, for instance is the Fashionable 
Authoress — where is Lady Fanny Flummery? 
She was done to death by Thackeray, and has 
left no heirs. I believe that Lang claims he 
had a commission once to discover the habitat 
of her successor, but was compelled to make 
return of the same unsatisfied. It is true 
Thackeray was not always so successful. He 
tried to suppress the poet who writes Odes to 
Dying Things, such as Frogs, Brook Trout, or 
whatever it may be, but he could not do it. 
She — I use the feminine advisedly — is immortal ; 
suppress her in one generation and she will 
break out in the next. She still lives to infest 
the watches of the moon, to write odes and 
other nameless things. She was a Miss Bunion 
in Thackeray's time and averred that her youth 
resembled : 



16 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

A violet shrinking- meanly 
When blows the March wind keenly; 
A timid fawn on upland lawn, 
Where oak-boughs rustle greenly. 
These thrice-crazed ones scatter sweet 
flowers about us still. Their dainty ribbon-tied 
volumes strew our libraries like autumn leaves 
in Vallombrosa. Yet after all, Thackeray's 
punishment of Miss Bunion was not in vain. 
His magisterial process is still out against her 
successors. Nor was it a vain labour for Mr. 
Yellowplush and the Sallybrated Mr. Smith, 
over a cold hoyster in the Yellowplush pantry, 
to hale Mr. Bulwer Lytton to the torture. 
That day was Fine Writing punctured so that 
the sawdust padding ran out of it. 

Unlike Nordau, Lang is not a Tartar of 
savage severity toward his convicts. That 
Vidocq of continental letters hangs his victims 
in chains in barbaric style, for the sun and wind 
to bleach. In this he is like Carlyle, who had 
a troglodyte nature and brained his with a 
stone axe. Lang has an Englishman's love of 
fair play. He gives quarter and treats his 
victim with courtly grace during the nec- 
essary torture. Captain John Smith did 
not behead the three Turks before the walls 



ANDREW LANG 17 

of Regall with more blandness or gentle 
affability. 

Lang makes the desert places of scholarship 
fair and pleasant with beauty and verdure. 
Greek is dry and arid when taught by dusty- 
brained pedantic parrots. Lang transmutes 
it until it lives again, bringing forth boughs 
like a plant. In his interpretation its dreary 
tasks become pleasant pastimes. He would 
have the college dry-as-dusts give way for one 
greater than they — the deathless singer, the 
sightless poet who saw all things ; who found 
the soul of song in far off mystic Illium, in 
surging seas and on battle fields, on dreary 
ocean coasts and lonely lost lands, in the tombs 
of the dead and in the darkness beyond, in the 
loves and hopes of statesmen and warriors, of 
rustics and ploughmen round their hearth-fires, 
in the legends of a thousand years, in the 
wanderings of the Grecian Chieftain and his 
return to the great hall where the suitors met ; 
who could pluck his dearest thought from the 
welcome home which the dumb and faithful 
Argus gave the wanderer. Lang would have 
the ardent student follow Ulysses in his wander- 
ings, unbelittled by translators, until by and 
bye the splendour and power of that wonderful 



18 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

melody would not let him sleep. Soon a 
knowledge of Greek would come, but better 
than this would come a knowledge of Homer. 
The finest thing in Lang is his worship of 
Homer. He seems to continually hunger and 
thirst for him. He holds him close to his heart 
in half -boyish adoration and fervour. He is a 
jealous lover, and cannot bear that Pope and 
Morris and others of the translator's mob, 
should put Homer into their rhyming strait- 
jackets. He is savage upon their trespasses 
and punishes them with many stinging scoffs 
and gibes. He has lived so much with Homer, 
that at will the centuries roll back and he sees 
the world that Homer saw. He loves Homer's 
lightest word better than all Pope's stilted 
rhymes. He makes one mourn for his ignorance 
of Greek, for it means that he can never know 
Homer for all that he is. 

Lang has the advantage of being a Scotch- 
man with English advantages. He is a later 
Socrates in a dress coat. Some one has said 
that he is too finished a product to become 
popular with the mass. I will admit that he is 
neither dull and heavy nor light and vulgar. 
After his title-page there is not a dull line, and 
even a title-page with the name of Andrew 



ANDREW LANG 19 

Lang- on it will illuminate a whole library. 
When I find a library tenanted by Andrew 
Lang, I confess to feeling vastly increased 
respect for the proprietor. Even the presence 
of She, or Mr. Barnes op New York in that 
library, cannot entirely destroy this good 
opinion. The scholar and man of letters may 
by inadvertence become the victim of the brazen 
train-boy. 

Lang disdains fine writing, and yet 
always writes finely, with the virile, powerful 
touch of a master. He does not hold himself 
above the common speech of people if by ranging 
there he can find the apt word or the rightly 
turned phrase. A scholar with the art to 
conceal the mere repelling externals of scholar- 
ship, Yale or Oxford could not take the fine 
temper out of such a soul as his. He did not 
come forth from the pedagogic inquisition 
afflicted with intellectual rickets. Whether the 
University Procrustes found him too long or 
too short, cannot be discovered from any tokens 
he bears. He comes into a world of much 
fustian scholarship, a true scholar, a loyal, 
perfect knight of the pen. 

But Lang is not all the critic, not all the 
man of war — the knight whose keen and biting 



20 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

rapier plays like lightning among the false and 
the foolish. 

There is another Lang — a poet and hero- 
worshipper, a lover of homely things, of homely 
human-kind ; one who takes content in watching 
his peaches ripen on the wall and his grapes on 
their trellis ; one who loves walks of peace and 
quietness, and who can see the "splendour in 
the grass, the glory in the flower;" one who 
can look upon lovers strolling together in the 
sweet English May-time with kindly eyes and 
softened heart. He is no longer young, but he 
can remember the loves and hopes of youth. 
With him : 

Manhood's noonday shadows hold 

The dews of boyhood's morning. 
If this were not so he could not have 
written such verses of baffling sweetness as 
these: 

Who wins his love shall lose her; 
Who loses her shall gain; 

For still the spirit wooes her, 
A soul without a stain ; 

And mem'ry still pursues her, 
With longings not in vain. 



ANDREW LANG 21 

In dreams she grows not older, 

The land of dreams among-, 
Though all the world wax colder, 

Though all the songs be sung-; 
In dreams shall he behold her, 

Still fair, and kind, and young-. 



HONORE DE BALZAC 

AS Balzac is favored with a minor place in 
Max Nordau's Gallery of Degenerates, I 
am disposed to make a deprecatory bow 
to that eminent vivisectionist. Some characters 
should be described by describing their op- 
posites — Mr. Gulliver said that he could better 
realize the huge dimensions of the Brobingnag- 
gians, because of his recent experiences in 
Lilliput. 

If I shall take liberties of comparison with 
any of the idols in our home temple of fame, it 
is not to make them seem more diminutive, but 
to give a better perspective for Balzac. Few of 
our countrymen have broken into his prodigious 
storehouse. The charming insularity of the 
truly patriotic American, prejudices him against 
the products of the effete despotisms. He says, 
we have our own shrines, why go abroad to 
worship? 

Hence the elevation of Howells, who never 
says damn, and who never levels even a small 

22 



HONORE DE BALZAC 23 

corner of his faithful kodacon any of the tabooed 
vulgarities. I confess I prefer a somewhat coarse 
bluntness to this chaste veiling. I defy any one, 
for instance, to tell just what sins Ho wells intends 
to impute to Bartley Hubbard. If Balzac had 
dealt with him, he would have stripped his soul 
naked, even if it did take coarse and vulgar 
words to do it. 

As we progress in social development, our 
society grows more clubbish. Gentle woman 
organizes herself, and pursues and gluts herself 
on Culture, without ceasing. We have Arnold 
Clubs and Browning Clubs, and what not, and 
the stones of Rome and the number of bricks 
in St. Paul's must be counted in didactic essay. 
Culture does not have much chance to escape 
these indefatigable pursuers. Yet those who 
grow weary of this child's game of Culture, 
this fishing in a water-pail and drawing nothing 
up, can find easy relief in the wisdom and 
strength of Balzac. 

Why watch continually the never-moving 
waters of smug literary mediocrity, when you 
have only to climb the steeps a little way and 
look upon the mighty sea? This immortal 
genius can bide its time however. It may yet 
become the fad of the Culture Clubs ; a reigning 



24 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

mode in literature. The Lily op The Valley, 
or Ursula, of crystal purity, may yet fill the place 
of the highly immoral Trilby. Pere Goriot 
may supersede Howell's Broomfield Corey, or 
that delightful old philistine, who gained 
ephemeral riches in mineral paint. 

We assure those who have become ac- 
customed to the pure and elevated morality of 
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and The Quick and the 
Dead, that they will find nothing to shock or 
disturb them in Balzac. The austere virgin, 
Propriety, should also be warned that she will 
see nothing very offensive in Balzac and that 
she had better not take the trouble to look for 
it. If she should by any chance have breathed 
too long the mephitic sewer gas of the Erotic 
School of American Fiction and Poetry, she 
may not at first have free respiration in the 
higher altitudes of Balzac. 

It is true that he does not aim to have a 
moral, ticketed and labeled as such, for every 
tale. He paints human life as he finds it, in 
its baseness and glory, in its weakness and its 
strength. He does not announce the moral, 
yet it is always present; in the punishment 
and repentance of the wicked, in the lives of 
the pure in heart, and in the hells which 



HONORE DE BALZAC 25 

evil souls build for themselves. Our gentle 
E. P. Roe, who should be called Pencils- 
and-Pickles, he is so much affected by young 
women towards the end of their bread- 
and-butter age, always builds his moral 
first, and then fits his story to it afterwards. 
He carries his pulpit around on his back as a 
snail does its residence, or an organ-grinder his 
instrument of torture and if he gets half a 
chance he will set it up and preach. 

Balzac tells his story and lets the moral 
take care of itself. He has no patent theological- 
seminary plan for coverting sinners. Where is 
there a finer sermon than the conversion of 
Doctor Minoret, led to repentance by the child 
he loved. 

"Can it be that you believe in God?" 
she cried with artless joy, letting fall the 

tears that gathered in her eyes. 
* * * 

"My God," he said in a trembling voice, 
raising his head, "if any one can obtain my 
pardon and lead me to Thee, surely it is this 
spotless creature. Have mercy on the 
repentant old age that this poor child 
presents to Thee. " 
Balzac has the carelessness and abandon 



26 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

of conscious power. He plays the prodigal with 
his talents. The sweepings of his attic would 
stock a dozen common skulls with genius, and 
make a dozen latter-day reputations. He is 
not concerned with the petty fears and alarms 
of small minds. One of their gods is Brevity. 
Your writer of magazine novelettes; your mere 
parlour entertainer, affects to abhor the Super- 
fluous Word. 

Balzac never bothers his head about it. 
His words come in great torrents, and the 
excess cannot hide his kingly port. Always 
present is the dramatic quality. You watch 
with terrour for his next effect. Our colder 
Teutonic blood has too little of this fire, and 
so genius becomes atrophied and lifeless. Afraid 
to give Nature speech, our strugglers after 
fame belittle the passions and make them tame 
and commonplace, or paint them in strange 
bizarre colors and in mangled grotesqueness. 
How different the mighty genius of Balzac! 
When Doctor Minoret weeps, Balzac says : — 
The tears of old men are as terrible as 
those of children are natural. 
The sorrows of Pere Goriot have a 
thousand eloquent tongues. What a profound 
and immeasurable baseness is that which 



HONORE DK BALZAC 27 

robbed him of his peace ! Throned in the 
majesty of death his whispers are heartrending. 
Sometimes he babbles childish nonsense, and 
sometimes shrieks his last terrible resentments. 
He calls for his daughters alternately in curses 
and words of endearment. You can feel him 
groping through the thick shadows for them, 
but they do not come. It is King Lear, with 
a difference. Finally, in the moment of dissolu- 
tion, God is merciful to this shattered soul. 
He sees again his daughters as little children, 
and calls them by the childish names he once 
gave them ; and so he passes from this inhuman 
world. 

One must walk with Balzac in fear and 
dread. His are not always the pleasant tasks 
of an idle hour. He will lead you through the 
hell of the living where you will meet dreadful 
shades and weeping, crucified, souls. He will 
also show you Complacent Respectability sitting 
in placid ease, "storing yearly little dues of 
wheat and wine and oil." He preaches a 
thousand sermons of the erring majesty of 
human life, but he does not, like Zola, batten 
on dunghills, and show you how much muck 
he can dig up. 



28 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

And now, what is the main difference 
between him and the Lilliputians? 

They are mere photographers, taking 
machine pictures with painful care. It is the 
difference between a kodac and the brush of a 
great master. 

He may be ever so careless and slovenly, 
but he has the hand of power, and when he 
sweeps his brush across the canvas, that canvas 
becomes one of the dear and priceless treasures 
of the world through all the centuries. 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 

CAPTIOUS persons may insist that they be 
made acquainted with the authority 
which prompts this further presentation 
of Thackeray lore. 

This seems to be agreeable to the demand 
that the distant suburbs of culture shall 
remain in eternal calm, except for the harryings 
of the Chatauqua Course and the literary tea 
and toast of the culture clubs. Yet this mes- 
sage will be unpretending, as becomes one from 
a place so far distant from the habitat of 
learned and approved reviewers. The point of 
view at least should not unduly prejudice the 
relation, for the ferment of London, Boston 
and New York is busy upon newer themes, and 
the soil once worked to exhaustion now lies 
fallow. 

Not consenting to the paramount jurisdic- 
tion of any reviewer whosoever, there is here 
presented some cumulative testimony on 
Thackeray, for it is the duty of each generation 

29 



30 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

to testify to all that has aforetime been done in 
letters. Thus divers testimonies can be pre- 
served for the use of posterity when it shall 
make up its final verdict. This review is 
offered by one who loves his task, a witness on 
minor points, merely as a deposition in rei 
perpetua memoriam, for what even such an 
one has thought of Thackeray may become a 
matter of curious and valuable interest some 
hundreds of years hence. The toiler and 
dreamer must look to that final judgment, and 
not the applause of the easily satisfied, who 
may crown a favourite to-day and uncrown him 
to-morrow. 

Not in profane analogy to the final judg- 
ment in the moral and spiritual world, but in 
the conceit of an idle hour, one can imagine a 
court of last resort for authors, in which there 
shall be a final decree on all fames and reputa- 
tions; where worth and not names shall 
control; where even some rejected manuscripts 
will give their testimony not disqualified by any 
past editorial verdict; where some obscure poets 
shall have due commendation, and the swollen 
reputations of some great men will suffer proper 
diminution. The poor scholar who has es- 
caped prosperity shall there be crowed with the 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 31 

tardy bays, and many darkened garrets of our 
Grub Streets will become visibly glorious in that 
effulgent justice. The magazine magnate who 
hears not the voice of genius until it be properly 
advertised, and who has spent his life-time 
putting its inspirations into strait- jackets; the 
Professional Organizer of Clacques for Small 
Performers; the Critics Banditti who hold up 
all travelers on the road to fame, will, let us 
trust, on that last judgment day find their 
deserved place among the goats. But surely 
there are some fames that will grow brighter 
and brighter in that last winnowing. Unless 
the known standards of excelence shall fail, in 
all the world of nineteenth century authorship, 
Thackeray will be given first place. 

Sometimes, owing to the failing memories 
of men, priceless things are lost sight of for a 
time, yet assurance seems now so full, that it 
cannot be so with Thackeray. With him, 
however, more than with any other author, the 
effect he produced on his readers forms a 
curious study. Some minds instinctively dis- 
like him and yet delight in Dickens and Bulwer 
Lytton. Such soils, however well sown with 
Thackerayism, blossom only into the meagerest 
appreciation. This trait is like unto the fabled 



32 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

inability of the North Briton to comprehend a 
joke. Is it because the satire of Thackeray is 
so sweeping and all-embracing that even the 
most obtuse reader imagines he is being mocked 
at and that all of his own vanities and follies 
are being rudely caricatured before his eyes? 
Happy is the man who can laugh at his own 
follies and jest at himself for the fool that he 
was on yesterday. To him Thackeray is a 
well-spring of delight. 

Both the comedy and tragedy of life have 
a sameness from generation to generation. It 
is a commonplace to say that names and social 
customs and forms of government change, but 
the nature of man remains as it was, and that 
the creations of Moli&re and Shakespeare will 
always have living duplicates. Who has not 
known a Tartuffe? Even a Falstaff is not 
difficult to find, and as for Nym, Pistol and 
Bardolph, they are as common as sawdust 
saloons. 

I have met the Old Campaigner — busy 
breeder of divorces that she is — and Becky 
Sharp still lives and continues to shoot young 
curates and other impressionable males dead 
with her soft glances. 

On the very threshold of Thackeray's 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 33 

world one cannot help but linger a little over 
his endearing personal qualities. Soon he will 
show us life's baseness and meanness, and it 
seems good to pause over some happier things 
before launching into the blacker and deeper 
currents. He was one of the lovable men of 
literature. Count them up and you will 
see how few of these there are. Some of 
the greatest names stand for icebergs of 
personality, and you can feel the lowering 
temperature as you near them. Do you always 
love the man behind the book? It is rank 
treason to suggest it, but can you feel affection 
for the man Dickens, for the man Tennyson, 
or for Bulwer Lytton ? I confess that I cannot ; 
they are only graven images and mere makers 
of books, as remotely frigid as the north pole. 
There is some coldness in the blood accounting 
for this that cannot be explained or analyzed. 
But, what warmth and cheer and glow of good 
fellowship and kindliness radiates from Thack- 
eray and Lamb and Holmes. When you read 
their words they become alive again, and when 
you think of them as dead, it brings a sharp 
pang of grief ; a sense of personal loss. Time 
cannot still their heart-throbs, and life and love 
are pulsing yet, despite the tokens of mortality. 



34 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

It may be that this repellant coolness in 
Tennyson and Dickens is due to the drop of 
Semetic blood ascribed to them by anthropolog- 
ical investigators. I think it is Besant who 
says that this tincture of the elder race is 
necessary to mental perfection, and that where 
it comes it leavens with an added genius the 
tough stubborn fibre of the Teutonic intellect. 
He adds that we all need a little of it in order 
to properly ripen our talents. 

In the lesser memoirs of the great poet we 
read that after he had written The Revenge 
and committed it to his publisher's hands and 
before it had become public property, he invited 
a choice company to hear it read. Probably no 
one but he could bring together such a group 
of listeners within the four seas. His grave 
biographer describes his reading generally as a 
"mysterious incantation exceedingly impress- 
ive, " and as he read on towards the end every 
heart was awed by the wonderful power of the 
immortal poem. 

He finally came to the close with such a 
strange mixture of genius and thrift that his 
hearers were frozen lifeless : — 

And they mann'd the Revenge with a 
swarthier alien crew, 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 35 

And away she sail'd with her loss and 

long'd for her own; 
When a wind from the lands they had 

ruin'd awoke from sleep, 
And the water began to heave and the 

weather to moan, 
And or ever that evening- ended a great 

gale blew, 
And a wave like the wave that is raised 

by an earthquake grew, 
Till it smote on their hulls and their sails 

and their masts and their flags, 
And the whole sea plunged and fell on 

the shot-shatter'd navy of Spain, 
And the little Revenge herself went down 

by the island crag's 
To be lost evermore in the main, 

and the beggars only gave me three 
hundred pounds for it — " 
quoth ray Lord Tennyson, not making 
pause at all between the last words of the poem 
and his execrations on the hard-hearted 
publishers who had driven a close bargain with 
him. It is hard to have the deathless minstrel 
sweep one hand across his harp, while with the 
other he clinks and counts his guineas. 
Doubtless not one of that noble assemblage 



36 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

ever forgot the scene, or could ever look on 
Locksley Hall as anything but a commercial 
pot-boiler, or on In Memoriam as other than 
a task to be paid for at so much a line. Behind 
the scenes one sees dimly the publishers and 
the poet, driving the bargains of an old 
clothes shop. 

How different this from Dante who "could 
hold heart-break at bay for twenty years and 
not let himself die until his task was done, " or 
Lamb "winning his way, with sad and patient 
soul, through evil and pain, and strange 
calamity." These two marshaled life's forces 
through black shadows, the one with a warrior's 
stern, set face, that never lightened and the 
other with pleasant jest, heedless of whether he 
won or lost, so he but hid the heartache. Who 
could turn from this real tragedy to Byron's 
counterfeit, or feel affection for him in his 
theatrical sorrow as he displayed in many 
postures his many-times-broken heart to the 
public gaze? 

It is for him who is a man first and a 
genius afterwards, that we reserve our best 
affection. We accord this to Thackeray for he 
had the heart of a child that worldly wisdom 
could not spoil. 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 37 

It is a far leap from these thoughts to 
Thackeray's land of snobs. He is markedly 
eminent as the only great specialist on this 
subject. He has taken them apart and put 
them together, and reduced them to their 
original elements. He has admired, dissected 
and played with them, and artfully drawn them 
out and felinely leaped upon them from 
cunning concealments. He has dug and 
searched for snobs in all social formations, and 
never without reward. He has made scientific 
research into all kinds, qualities, conditions 
and degrees of snobs, and classified, arranged, 
named, numbered, indexed and cross-referenced 
them. He has grilled them sometimes savagely, 
and sometimes lovingly, for he had a grotesque 
form of affection for them such as Dickens said 
that he had for the pigs which he saw disporting 
themselves in the streets of New York. Given 
one scale of any species of snob, and Thackeray 
could construct the complete animal. He takes 
a just pride in his cabinet of snobs where there 
are multitudes of them artistically arranged 
with pens stuck through their snobbish thoraces. 
Among these remains are Clerical, Royal, 
Military, Respectable, Great, City, Banking, 
Scholastic, Irish, Sporting, University, Theat- 



38 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

rical, Professional and Official Snobs. Being 
pressed to define Literary Snobs, the satirical 
rogue says : 

The fact is that in the literary profession 

there are no snobs. Look around over the 

whole body of British men of letters, and I 

defy you to point out a sing-le instance of 

vulgarity, or envy, or assumption. 

This genial snob-hunter sometimes beats 

up his own thickets. He admits that he would 

rather walk down Pall Mall arm in arm with a 

Lord than with a commoner, and would feel a 

snobbish elation if he could only be seen between 

two dukes in Picadilly. In the divine ardour of 

the chase he is willing to jeeringly trice himself 

up. If at any time one feels a tendency to 

snobbishness, he can de-snobize himself by 

consulting Thackeray's probe and scalpel. We 

arise from this feast of snobs to ask if there is 

any place free from the Snob? Is there no wild 

of England, Scotland or Ireland, or Thibet or 

Crim-Tartary, or among the Anthropophagi, 

where a snob is not? 

Thackeray gave but the most casual 
investigation to the fauna of this continent. He 
had doubtless read our history and knew that 
there were no snobs here, and that in this 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 39 

republican men were created equal and recognized 
neither rank nor social condition as conferring 
any distinction. He must have found that 
snobs, like weeds, do not grow on new soils. 
No, we do not love a lord better than a 
commoner; we do not envy our neighbours; we 
do not think meanly of and inflict slights on 
those less fortunate than ourselves; we do not 
think better of any man because of his wealth. 
No one here "meanly admires mean things, " 
which is his definition of a snob. Our interna- 
tional marriages with foreign titles have been 
possible only because of the singular worth of the 
groom involved, and also, by reason of the — 
worth of the bride. With us, kind hearts are 
more than coronets, and, thank heaven, we have a 
proper contempt for the social sycophancy of the 
degenerate Briton. Those fecund Irish kings 
and noble families of the three islands have no 
noble descendants here who brag of their long 
descent, and we who know that our ancestry is 
noble, never mention it and do not esteem 
ourselves for it. 

There is one line of fiction in which 
Thackeray is not great. He portrayed no 
murderers, no Napoleonic criminals who slept 
in the contriving of crime and awoke to do it. 



40 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

He had no love for slumming, and did not, like 
a respectable sort of scavenger, rake over the 
refuse of the London streets for lessons and 
sermons and fine morals with which to adorn 
his romance. 

He made the novel a public conveyance 
where all sorts of people might find carriage; 
where Parson Honey man is rudely jostled by 
Mr. Moss, and the gentle Amelia and Captain 
Raff touch elbows; where callow Pendennis 
hotly courts the ancient Fotheringay, chap- 
eroned by the redoubtable Costigan; where 
Becky Sharp and her vis-a-vis, the stately 
Semiramis Pinkerton, picked up as the coach 
rolls by C his wick Mall, make faces at each 
other; where the Castlewoods cease not their 
genteel family quarrels, and Lady Maria begins 
that little Affair with the French dancing 
master; where the Virginians arrange for the 
early morning meeting with their lately esteemed 
friend, G. W. ; where Philip glowers hatred at 
his father and Clive and Barnes Newcome fall 
to cousinly insults and blows; while ever 
watchful in his corner sits a humorous "Literary 
Gent, M as the genial Harry Foker calls him, 
taking notes and chuckling now and then as 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 41 

the coach speeds away, and the ruts bring out 
the temper of the passengers. 

There are inns to be made, and new 
passengers to be taken up, and old ones to be 
put down, and country roads stretching before, 
and narrow towns to pass, and by and bye, 
the din and roar of the great Babylon. But 
the journey is never long and never weary, for 
always you are keeping close company with 
human life, and are looking breathlessly into 
its meanness and its majesty. 

Take joy of this ferment and turmoil of 
living and loving and hating, and so that you 
may love it the more heartily, turn and look 
upon the single-seated equipages of romance 
that are trundled before us in this part of the 
world. The single nondescript passenger that 
you see is the author's fad in morals, religion 
or politics, or some flotsam gleaned from the 
nine days' talk of the tea parties, or furbished 
out of the last labour strike, the newest phase 
of the New Woman, the Chicago Fire, the 
Charleston Earthquake, or the last visitation of 
Cholera or Yellow Fever. Any commonplace 
of this kind furnishes plot and pabulum and all 
manner of excellencies to our story- writers 
of pauperized wits. Among them are the 



42 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Obituary Novelists, who, like the Obituary 
Poets in the country newspapers, go hand in 
hand with Death. Let Death come to a city 
with generous stroke, in Flood, Fire, Earth- 
quake, or Plague and the public can draw at 
ninety days on the Obituary Novelists for this 
mortuary aftermath of fiction. Thus comes 
our Dreary School of Romance. 

Its upbuilders select a supposed dramatic 
situation or center and round it range the 
puppet characters, who chatter from page to 
page some text of commonplace and are as 
sentient and alive as a lot of wooden Indians. 
Thus we have had; "Bulwarks Burned Down," 
"The Earth Shook," "Saved by the Flood," 
"Plague Stricken, " etc., etc. " The Washer- 
woman of Finchley Common, ' ' would be of 
riotous interest as compared with some of these. 
Their admirers are one with the Exeter Hall 
enthusiast who declared that he would rather 
be the author of the tract named than of 
Paradise Lost. 

But come away to where we have better 
mettle. Thackeray deals with respectable 
wickedness in the main ; a wickedness of 
cushioned pews and pretty pulpits, and em- 
inently virtuous drawing rooms; of assemblies 






WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 43 



where highly respectable people such as you 
and I know, eat, drink and make merry; a 
wickedness of pleasant family circles where all 
hands quarrel in a perfectly genteel way; a 
wickedness which goes hand in hand with 
Christian church-going, with Christian alms- 
giving, with loyal support of the State and all 
established institutions; a wickedness which 
dresses in the paint and tinsel of conventional 
moralities, which sits in the boxes in Vanity 
Fair, and looks down with stern scorn on the 
ungenteel low-down wickedness of the pit ; — in 
short a philistine, pharisaical, canting, time- 
serving, toadying, sham-loving, holier-than-thou 
wickedness that cankers and rots character like 
a leprosy. You will sometimes turn your head 
away from this rout of respectable sinners for 
shame of our common humanity. 

You do not need to pray to be saved from 
the crimes of the statute books, but you may 
need to be saved from the sins of the Old 
Campaigner, of Mrs. Bute Crawley, of Barnes 
Newcome, of Old Osborne, of Lady Kew, and 
the Reverend Honeyman, of the Pontos, the 
Botibels, the Clutterbucks, and Lady Susan 
Scraper, and many others. These were all of 
approved respectability and some of them made 



44 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

a great figure in Vanity Fair. They did not 
pick pockets or commit murder, but acted in 
all things as a great many respectable people 
about you do, yet how you despise and loathe 
them. These are Thackeray's Helots, drunken 
with greed and selfishness and all uncharitable- 
ness, shown as examples of what respectable 
men and women may do and still keep their 
rags of respectability. 

We do not have to be warned against the 
wickedness of Sykes, and Fagin, and Jonas 
Chuzzlewit, of Quilp and Brass. Their de- 
pravity has no enticement ; it is vulgar and 
repelant. The warning in Thackeray's sermons 
is for the Respectable Wicked, and the most 
complacent sinner will wince under this lash. 
Thackeray loved a man, and would have nothing 
less. With him : 

One ruddy drop of manly blood 
The surging sea outweighs. 
He never spares himself. Here is one of 
his self-indictments: 

I never could count how many causes 
went to produce any given effect in a person's 
life, and have been, for my own part many a 
time quite misled in my own case, fancying 
some grand, some magnanimous, some vir- 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 45 

tuous reason for an act of which I was proud, 
when lo! some pert little satirical monitor 
springs up inwardly, upsetting" the fond 
humbug which I was cherishing — the pea- 
cock's tail wherein my absurd vanity had clad 
itself — and says; "Away with boasting; I 
am the cause of your virtue my lad. You are 
pleased that yesterday at dinner you refrained 
from the dry champagne. My name is 
Worldly Prudence, not Self Denial, and I 
caused you to refrain. You are pleased 
because you gave a guinea to Diddler. I am 
Laziness, not Generosity which inspired 
you. You hug yourself because you resisted 
other temptation? Coward, it was because 
you dared not run the risk of the wrong! 
Out with your peacock's plumage! Walk off 
in the feathers which Nature gave you, and 
thank Heaven they are not altogether 
black. " 

Yet the same hand wrote this of a woman 
looking back forty years to the love of her youth : 
Oh, what tears have they shed, gentle 
eyes! Oh, what faith has it kept, tender 
heart! If love lives through all life, and 
survives through all sorrow; and remains 
steadfast with us through all changes ; and 



46 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

in all darkness of spirit burns brightly ; and, 
if we die, deplores us forever, and loves still 
equally; and exists with the very last g"asp 
and throb of the faithful bosom — whence it 
passes with the pure soul beyond death ; sure 
it shall be immortal. 

And like it is what he said of the gulf of 
time, and parting, and grief: 

And the past and its dear histories, and 
youth and its hopes and passions, and tones 
and looks forever echoing in the heart, and 
present in the memory — these no doubt, poor 
Clive saw and heard as he looked across the 
great gulf of time, and parting and grief, and 
beheld the woman he had loved for many 
years. There she sits; the same, but 
changed; as gone from him as if she were 
dead; departed indeed into another sphere, 
and into a kind of death. 

If Thackeray dearly loved a man, he also 
loved a boy. He is the historian, the epic poet 
of boyhood. The boy is an unknown quantity 
to the average novelist ; he is elusive and protean 
and evades description. Some great novelists, 
although undoubtedly once boys themselves, 
make mere caricatures of boys. Little Lord 
Fauntleroy was a charming creature but he 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 47 

was not a boy. D 'Israeli's boys are all old 
men ; they attain three-score before they are 
twenty. Witness the grand entrance of some 
of these unfeathered ones in the world of politics 
and letters. They discourse of affairs of state 
before they have achieved the big manly voice. 
If you should chance to meet one of these very 
old young gentlemen at Rod well Regis' or Dr. 
Birch's school you would no more think of 
giving him a tip to buy sweets with, than you 
would of tipping Mr. Gladstone. Thomas 
Bailey Aldrich and Mark Twain have told us 
of some real boys, and William Allen White is 
now engaged, as I understand, in the restoration 
of the Boy to fiction. 

In behalf of these gentlemen and all men 
who have been boys I protest against expurgated 
editions of boyhood. Like Cromwell with the 
portrait painter, I want to have the picture 
show all the blemishes. You will have to make 
long search in Dickens before you will find a 
real boy. He has some impossible creations 
that are called boys, but as a rule they are 
grotesque freaks, mere caricatures, made up by 
selecting and emphazing some one boyish trait. 
This gives a mere fragment of a boy. The Fat 
Boy for instance, simply eats and sleeps — 



48 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

admittedly too meager an endowment of boyish 
talent. 

The Dickens Boy is given to the most 
impossible grown-up language. Here is a 
sample from Mrs. Lirriper's lodgings. The 
boy says, in a burst of childish confidence to 
the old lady who has adopted him : 

And now dear Gran, let me kneel down 
here, where I have been used to say my 
prayers, and let me fold my face for just a 
minute in your gown, and let me cry, for you 
have been more than mother, more than 
father, more than sisters, friends to me. 
This is exactly the way the forty-year-old 
boy talks in a popular play. But no real ten- 
year-old ever talked like that. Oliver Twist 
was not much of a boy. The nearest he came 
to it, was when he asked for more, and when 
he blacked Noah Clay pole's eye. But these 
events seemed in the nature of accidents and 
not indicative of any settled boyish habit. 

Thackeray has no counterfeit boys. He 
never got over being a boy himself and so he 
knew boys. He does not have them continually 
at stage business. They fight and fag each 
other and are flogged religiously and unavail- 
ingly; they fill up on hardbake and raspberry 




WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 49 



tart, they run in debt for goodies, and dote on 
hampers from home, and hate books and love 
fun. Clive goes to Aunt Honey man's and she 
stuffs him with sweets as is the manner of aunts 
the world over. Sad is the childhood that does 
not have such an aunt. I vow I would rather 
have seen the fight between Champion Major 
the First Cock of Doctor Birch's School, and 
the Tutbury Pet, or the one between Cuff and 
Dobbin, than the combat between the late 
Messrs. Fitzsimmons and Corbett. 

But Thackeray is most happy with his 
boys in the salad time, between hay and grass, 
when the childish treble changes to a more 
virile note. Few elders understand a boy at 
this time, nor does he understand himself. If 
you choose to laugh at the many nebulous 
aspirations, hopes and ambitions that come to 
him, then you are laughing over the grave of 
your own youth where lies all that was best in 
you. Make your mirth kindly, for so you toiled, 
and sorrowed and played up the slope of man- 
hood. The silly hours, the follies in love, the 
wanton freaks and callow vices, the fitful starts 
that mark the changing mind, are all pictures 
of your own youth. You have turned them to 
the wall and forgotten them, or wish you could 



50 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

forget them. Thackeray has dealt kindly with 
this world of hobbledehoyhood. He has peopled 
it with Arthur Pendennis, Phillip, Clive, the 
Virginians and many more of unripe wits. He 
is youth's kindliest, most generous mentor. 
'Tis sometimes one whether this boy-man is 
laughing or crying over this dreamland of youth. 

It was as if he had the same opinion as 
Dr. Busby, who was asked how he contrived 
to keep all his preferments, and the head- 
mastership of Westminster School, through 
the turbulent times of Charles I, Cromwell, 
and Charles II; He replied: "The fathers 
govern the nation; the mothers govern the 
fathers; the boys govern the mothers; and I 
govern the boys. " 

He could live over again that many-sided 
boyhood with its selfishness and generosity, its 
cruelty and humanity, its justice and injustice, 
its queer, strange, code of established laws and 
customs. Always a boy at heart, he could 
easily turn back to the old days of smiles and 
tears, of feasting and fighting, of loosely 
mingled work and play, and feel again the 
thrill of those early griefs and joys, and that 
first fond love for many companions whom the 
dust has long covered. 



w 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 51 

It was in child-hearted mood that he wrote 
the poem where are these lines : 
I'd say we suffer and we strive 

Not less or more as men than boys; 
With grizzled beards at forty-five, 

As erst at twelve in corduroys. 
And if in time of sacred youth, 

We learned at home to love and pray, 
Pray heaven that early love and truth 

May never wholly pass away. 
The Thackeray Woman is a delicate 
subject — a complex creature, and not to be 
roughly classified. Our author has been widely 
accused of making his women either fools or 
knaves, and of disparaging the sex to the point 
of slander. This criticism is really based on 
supersensitive gallantry. In fact, Thackeray 
treated the sexes impartially, and dealt out 
stripes and favour with an equal hand. He did 
not create any lofty and flawless women, 
but neither did he create any men of this 
character. 

Becky Sharp, The Old Campaigner, and 
the fair, false Beatrix and many other selfish, 
nagging, toadying, respectable and semi- 
respectable women that he has painted are in 
his Rogues Gallery, side by side with George 



52 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Osborne, the brainless cad, the Marquis of 
Steyne, and Barnes Newcome. 

We are not unmindful that Zenobia 
Packer, who belongs to no one knows how 
many clubs, and is president of the Woman's 
Emancipation League, and who aims a rapid 
fire of treatises and addresses at the Tyrant, 
Man, and is high chum with Lady Summersault, 
the English head of the Movement for Purity 
and Reform, thinks that Amelia Sedley was a 
little fool, and that all of the Thackeray women 
of gentle mould who prayed among their 
children, and clung fiercely to their household 
deities, and never cared whether they had any 
rights or not, were poor puling weak-spirited 
creatures, who would be entirely out of date 
now. Go thy way, Zenobia, to thy clubs and 
thy culture, and thy meat for the strong- 
minded ; pace the platform with mannish strides; 
harangue obdurate Man until he cries for 
quarter, and hunt the bubble Notoriety from 
convention to convention. 

TyrantMan would return yourcompliments 
with interest if he dared. And you, Hysterical 
One who spleen on marriage service lest it have 
occult power to subjugate you, and who analyze 
and re- analyze all your emotions and feelings 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 53 

before you use them, and hold high prate and 
debate over deum and teum, follow your 
labyrinth and let petty Discontent gnaw you, 
but leave healthy humanity to its worship of 
old-fashioned idols. 

If to be gentle, and loving, and kindly, and 
unselfish; to be ignorant of most of the 
wickedness of the world, to believe in and trust 
and idealize a faulty, human, son or brother or 
husband, and to forgive him seventy times 
seven, and to pour unmeasured love upon him 
without pausing to see whether it is all 
measured back or not ; to be generous and 
charitable to all erring souls, and to hate all 
wickedness, stamps a woman as a poor weak- 
spirited creature, then may heaven send us 
more of such women to bless and cheer the 
world and make it better. Amelia, it is true 
loved a cad, but evil tongues were hushed in 
her presence. The Little Sister artlessly 
dropped her h's, and said "feller," and was 
not at all strong-minded, but in silence she let 
her own good name suffer a deadly wound in 
order that she might save the boy, not her own, 
from an inheritance of shame. 

Some apology is due for approaching the 
everlasting parallel between Dickens and 



54 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Thackeray ; but this habit of comparison has 
become a fixed and ineradicable trait in all of 
their admirers. The question of superiority 
between them is probably as unworthy of serious 
contention as are some of those favourites of 
the Ethiopian debating societies. 

Dickens will undoubtedly always be more 
popular with the masses. His humour, his 
mannerisms, his bent for fine writing, his long 
drawn pathos, his unwearying play of sorrow 
and emotion and his conventional sermonizing 
on the moralities, are more taking than the 
quick, sweeping strokes of Thackeray. 

Thackeray disdained pretentious writing 
and all overdrawn, overworn scenes. He has 
no Solitary Horsemen, no prefatory tales of 
wind and storm, no stale theatrical tricks or 
devices, or tawdry stage properties. He leaves 
all the gorgeous imagery of sky and storm and 
landscape to other limners. Life's great joys 
and sorrows are not made wearying with long 
speech or ornate funeral rhetoric. Before a 
death bed, he is not like Dame Quickly or some 
garrulous caretaker of the chamber, chattering 
and gossipping of the last hour; he but 
reverently draws the curtain back for a 
momentary view and then closes it again. He 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 55 

does not prologue his art and bid you prepare 
to laugh or weep before the occasion. 

Yet he excels Dickens, and, indeed, most 
others, as a master of style. The pedant, the 
mere grammarian, or linguistic martinet, prunes 
and pares our mother-tongue into bashful 
regularity — into ordered line and phrase. It is 
then as the trees in the ground of some 
parvenue gardener, trimmed into grotesque 
architecture and deformity, shorn of their grace 
and beauty, and mere caricatures of the great 
forests. 

Thackeray will have none of this; he 
touches the barren rock of dictionary lore, and 
the living words gush forth. 

Some of the best examples of his style are 
found in the introduction of Major Pendennis 
reading his morning mail, in the perusal of 
which you get several life histories; in the scene 
where Colonel Esmond discards the young 
pretender, and in Colonel Newcome's last hour. 
In these are shown the marvel and power of a 
few simple words. 

Like music answering music is a younger 
author's affectionate tribute to the great 
master. 

In his Letters to Dead Authors, Lang 



56 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

says of Thackeray's style, using for his text 
Thackeray's own words, " Forever echoing in 
the heart and present in the memory:" 

Who has heard these tones, who does not 
hear them as he turns over your books that, 
for so many years have been companions and 
comforters? We have been young and old, 
we have been sad and merry with you, we 
have listened to the midnight chimes with 
Pen and Warrington, have stood with you 
beside the death-bed, have mourned at that 
yet more awful funeral of lost love, and with 
you have prayed in the inmost chapel sacred 
to our old and immortal affections, a leal 
souvenirl And whenever you speak for your- 
self, and speak in earnest, how magical, how 
rare, how lonely in our literature is the 
beauty of your sentences! "I cannot express 
the charm of them," so you wrote of George 
Sand; so we may write of you. They seem 
to me like the sound of country bells, pro- 
voking I don't know what vein of music and 
meditation, and falling sweetly and sadly on 
the ear. Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so 
full of surprises — that style which stamps as 
classical your fragments of slang, and per- 
petually astonishes and delights — would alone 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 57 

give immortality to an author, even had he 
little to say. 

But you with your whole wide world of 

fops and fools, of good women and brave men, 

of honest absurdities and cheery adventurers ; 

you who created the Steynes and Newcomes, 

the Beckys and Blanches, Captain Costigan 

and F. B. and the Chevalier Strong— all that 

host of friends imperishable — you must 

survive with Shakespeare and Cervantes in 

the memory and affections of men. 

When Thackeray grows weary of snobvS 

and their ways, and of the meanness and 

baseness of life, he has places of refuge, where 

no evil comes, but only charity and worth and 

manliness. These are his temples, and some 

deity of truth is worshipped in each. You can 

weep and pray with him here, and walk forth 

with new-opened heart. I liken him to the 

Ancient Mariner, homeward bound after that 

voyage of evil sights, who crosses the harbour 

bar, and sees the light-house top, and the kirk 

and feels the familiar homely flush of life in his 

own country once more. Straightway his spirit 

falls prone and he learns the message he is to 

take to all, that he prayeth best, who loveth 

best, all things both great and small. So, when 



58 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Thackeray comes to the lives of good men and 
women, he casts off his hardihood and cynicism, 
and sees only the things that he loves best. If 
he created Becky Sharp, and George Osborne 
and Barnes Newcome, he also gave us The 
Little Sister, and Amelia Sedley, and dear old 
Dobbin. 

The wickedness and baseness is over- 
matched by Colonel Newcome, and where in all 
literature is there so simple, kindly, manly and 
chivalrous a soul. Almost the first we see of 
him is in the coffee-room when he arises from 
his seat, trembling with indignation and stalks 
out with little Clive, because one of the baccha- 
nalians commences to sing a ribald song. His 
life is all one prayer for his boy. When the evil 
days came and the lash of The Old Campaigner 
fell upon him, he bowed his shoulders in charity 
and patience. In the real world it might be 
hard to find men like him, but unquestionably 
there are women like her. We last see him in 
Gray Friars, one of the Poor Brethren, accepting 
with blended pride and humility the dole of 
charity for a little time until death comes. 
With Clive, and Ethel, and Madame de Florae, 
whom he had loved and lost forty years before, 
clinging to his hands, he heard the evening bell 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 59 

strike as his summons came, and raising his 
head called " Adsum/' the word he answered 
with when names were called at school. Colonel 
Newcome alone redeems Thackeray from the 
charge of thinking too meanly of human-kind. 
His own careless lines best close the page: 
The play is done; the curtain drops, 
Slow falling to the prompter's bell; 
A moment yet the actor stops, 

And looks around to say farewell. 
It is an irksome work and task; 

And when he's laughed and said his say 
He shows, as he removes the mask, 

A face that's anything- but gay. 

* * * 

Come wealth or want, come good or ill, 

Let young and old accept their part, 
And bow before the Awful Will, 

And bear it with an honest heart. 
Who misses, or who wins the prize? 

Go, lose or conquer as you can ; 
But if you fail, or if you rise, 

Be each, pray God, a gentleman. 



DEGENERATION 

IN his Degeneration, Dr. Nordau comes 
crashing into literature like the traditionary 
bull into a china shop. When that rude 
invasion occurred, according to some accounts, 
the proprietor of the shop, after the intruder 
had been led away to the shambles, took an 
inventory of the ruins. He found great wreckage 
of silly gingerbread-ware, of costly stucco, and 
antique vases, priceless because they were old ; 
he found broken specimens made famous and 
notable because some mad fancier had started 
the fashion of doting on them, and many other 
sheep-like madmen had chased after their 
leaders. Some of these fragments were ground 
into dust and past all patching; but others he 
noted he could stick together and hide their 
wounds, or, better still, could parade them 
maimed and battered in proof of their great 
antiquity. To maintain my figure properly I 
choose to believe that this shopkeeper was a 
collector, a connoisseur, a lover of rare old 

60 



DEGENERATION 61 

pottery who paid fabulous prices for such as 
pleased his taste; one who valued many of the 
gems of his collection, not because they were 
artistic, but because they were hideous, and 
other pieces because no one else had them, and 
still others because some Royal Society had set 
its approval on them. I shall assume that he 
had some dingy lies purporting to come from 
the palaces of Pompeii, or the tombs of Etrusca, 
that reallv hailed from the shed of some vile 
nineteenth century potter. The bull must have 
knocked some of the grimy deceiving glaze from 
these gauds and shown them for what they were. 
Our antiquarian could solace himself with the 
thought that he could afford to lose some of 
his wares; could patch others and deceive the 
public with the fragments, and that after all, 
his best treasures were on the higher shelves 
and received no harm. In the case at bar, as 
the lawyers say, we who keep the literary shop 
have walked about since Nordau darkened our 
doors, picking up the ruins and ruefully 
surveying the broken idols. 

We find much dull clay gilded as wedge- 
wood and rare china; we find antiquities that 
were made yesterday with no more lies to tell; 
we find that some things can be patched 



62 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

together; and, thankfully, we find that 
some priceless treasures were placed so high 
that this raging iconoclast could not harm 
them. Let us, then, rejoice over our 
salvage. As for Nordau, he has been led away 
to the critic's shambles, there to await the 
lethal strokes of ten thousand daggers. 

The vendetta between him and his victims, 
and victims' victims has become international. 
It is our happiness to sit around in the pleasant 
amphitheatre and watch the killing, moved 
only by the love of truth. Under no cir- 
cumstances let us turn up our thumbs for the 
king's mercy. This charge of one man upon 
an army will be one of the famous braveries in 
literature. He faced only the leaders at first, 
"the prime in order and in might, " but behind 
these come the inferior orders, and then the ten 
thousand thousand disciples of the Degenerates. 
This rude shock did not even spare the temple 
of France where the Forty Immortals are safely 
housed beyond all necessity of struggling for 
fame. It is vain however to suppose that the 
common business of establishing cults will be 
lessened much. We will still continue to give 
to our newest Genius assurance of fame by 
naming clubs after him, and disciplining an 




DEGENERATION 63 

army to ring his perpetual eulogy. In club 
circles it will still be thought blasphemous that 
critics like Nordau should disturb public 
worship by their rude and fretful speech. We 
shall spend many a decade hereafter listening 
to the donkey chorus, and watching the halo, 
which Dullness always delights to place around 
Dullness, grow and fade. 

I have my own fee-grief however. After 
reading Nordau, I bethought me of those 
ancient library favourites — those storehouses of 
polite letters — the Poets' Argosy; Treasures 
of Verse; and Sheaves Gleaned From the 
Great Ocean of Literature. I fear that 
I have been harbouring Degenerates behind 
these wooden walls. I know that the gentle- 
souled compilers, always thoughtful of the 
manners and morals of their patrons, have 
already expurgated much, yet I may have to 
follow them with the blue pencil. If I must, I 
shall even tear out a forbidden leaf here and 
there. If an intimate friend of mine is arrested 
at my house charged with a heinous crime, 
shall I go off to goal and bail him out, and 
provide for his defense, not caring for my own 
safety? Or will it be more prudent for me to 
come out boldly and honestly against himj 



64 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

frankly admit that he may be guilty, and that 
I have observed suspicious things about him 
for a long time, as I frequently remarked to my 
other friend, Smith, as Smith very well knows? 
Is not this the best way to get away from the 
ridicule and shame of the matter, especially as 
I remember trying to make many people believe 
that my friend in custody was a worthy, honest 
fellow? How can I clear myself of the suspicions 
arising from my intimacy with the criminal 
unless I repudiate him utterly? If I have had 
a sneaking fondness for Swinburne and Maeter- 
linck, now that Nordau has made his arrest, is 
it my best policy to attempt a rescue, or, shall 
I abandon them to their fate; denounce them 
in an airy off-handed way, and announce that 
I never approved of them and am glad of their 
exposure? 

Indeed, Nordau says that Degenerates love 
a Degenerate, and thus I may become classified 
as a Mattoid, an Egomaniac, or a Grapho- 
maniac, simply because of the company I have 
kept. These questions as to what faith shall 
be maintained with old friends are matters of 
casuistry that the honourable reader will settle 
for himself. 

For my own part, I think that if an 



DEGENERATION 65 

author, after having deceived us these many 
years, now turns out under a new diagnosis to 
be a Mattoid or other monster, he is not entitled 
to much consideration, and we owe it to our- 
selves to look out for ourselves. The dear 
ladies who have wept sentimentally over Ibsen's 
multifarious sweet follies; the loveless ones who 
have 'scaped either matrimony or its happiness, 
and who find comfort in Tolstoi because he 
preaches that marriage is not only a failure but 
a desecration ; the ardent devotees of realism who 
have followed in Zola's furrow as he subsoiled 
dunghills; the many youths of kindling minds 
who have been lured by the gorgeous colouring 
of Swinburne and Rossetti, as the savage is 
lured by a red blanket and glass beads ; those 
who love the dictionary conglomerates of 
Maeterlinck, Baudelaire and Nietzsche — must 
endure the shock of seeing their deified good 
masters turned into swine — into Yahoos, whom 
none shall reverence. 

Nordau has the scientist's rage for classify- 
ing the unclassifiable. To the layman the task 
seems as vain as that of the phrenologists who 
subdivide the human skull into compartments, 
stocking each with its appropriate tenant. It 
is urged that Nordau pleads his cause against 



66 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

the Degenerates with too much vehemence; but 
a juror need not assume that an advocate has 
a bad case, because he argues it with 
exaggeration and energy. This new science of 
Degeneration has begotten names and titles 
that are appalling to the n on -professional 
reader. How are pupils in the lower forms to 
know what Masochism, Megalomania, Neo- 
Catholicism, Graphomania, Anthropomor- 
phism, Zoomorphism, Echolalia and many 
other titles of strange disease, are? The 
scholars must supply literature with a new 
index for its maladies, or else allow us to lump 
them off under the head of Nervous Prostration 
or General Debilitv. 

To a native of the upper Mississippi Valley, 
this baiting and harrying of the Degenerates 
seems like a visitation of righteous wrath only 
too long delayed. In places where literature 
has an established service and a common law 
of tradition and custom, success seems generally 
to follow persistent clacking and tickling. You 
talk up my new poem and I will talk up your 
new novel; thus pigmy calls to pigmy, and a 
great deal of noise is made about nothing. If 
this persistent reciprocal advertising be kept 
up long enough the Public will soon come to 



DEGENERATION 67 

think we are both great men. Would you 
know how great fame is built up out of nothing, 
read Nordau's account of the making of 
Maeterlink: 

This pitiable mental cripple vegetated for 
years wholly unnoticed in his corner of Ghent 
without the Belgian Symbolists, who outbid 
even the French, according him the slightest 
attention; as to the public at large, no one had 
a suspicion of his existence. Then one fine 
day in 1890 his writings fell accidently into 
the hands of the French novelist, Octave 
Mirabeau. He read them, and whether he 
desired to make fun of his contemporaries in 
grand style, or whether he obeyed some 
morbid impulsion is not known ; it is sufficient 
to say that he published in Le Figaro an 
article of unheard of extravagance, in which 
he represented Maeterlinck as the most 
brilliant, sublime, moving poet which the last 
three hundred years had produced, and 
assigned him a place near — nay, above 
Shakespeare. And then the world witnessed 
one of the most extraordinary, and most 
convincing examples of the force of suggestion 
The hundred thousand rich and cultivated 
readers to whom Figaro addresses itself 



68 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

immediately took up the views which Mirbeau 
had imperiously suggested to them. They 
at once saw Maeterlinck with Mirbeau 's eyes. 
They found in him all the beauties which 
Mirbeau asserted that he perceived in him. 
Anderson's fairy tale of the invisible clothes 
of the emperor repeated itself line for line. 
They were not there, but the whole court 
saw them. Some imagined they really saw 
the absent state robes; the others did not 
see them, but rubbed their eyes so long that 
they at least doubted whether they saw them 
or not; others again could not impose on 
themselves, but dared not contradict the 
rest. Thus Maeterlinck became at one 
stroke, by Mirbeau 's favour, a great poet, 
and a poet of u the future. " Mirbeau had also 
given quotations which would have completely 
sufficed for a reader who was not hysterical, 
not given over irresistibly to suggestion, to 
recognize-Maeterlinck for what he is, namely, 
a mentall} 7 debilitated plagiarist; but these 
very quotations wrung cries of admiration 
from the Figaro public, for Mirbeau had 
pointed them out as beauties of the highest 
rank, and every one knows that a decided 
affirmation is sufficient to compel hypnotic 



DEGENERATION 69 

patients to eat raw potatoes as oranges and 
to believe themselves to be dogs or other 
quadrupeds. 
Nordau gives out this as his text : 

Degenerates are not always criminals, 
prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced 
lunatics; they are often authors and artists. 
These however manifest the same mental 
characteristics, and, for the most part, the 
same somatic features as the members of the 
above anthropological family. 
This is his indictment of the great donkey- 
like public. 

But grievous is the fate of him who has 
the audacity to characterize aesthetic fashions 
as forms of mental decay. The author or 
artist attacked never pardons a man for 
recognizing in him the lunatic or charlatan; 
the subjectively garrulous critics are furious 
when it is pointed out how shallow and 
incompetent they are, or how cowardly when 
swimming with the stream ; and even the 
public is angered when forced to see that it 
has been running after fools, quack dentists 
and mountebanks as so many prophets. Some 
among these degenerates in literature, music 
and painting have in recent years come into 



70 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

extraordinary prominence, and are revered 
by numerous admirers as creators of a new 
art, and heralds of the coming" centuries. 
He defines Degeneration as "a morbid 
deviation from an original type. " He says : 
The society which surrounds the 
degenerate always remains strange to him. 
The Englishman is conquered by an absurd- 
ity accompanied by diagrams. Ruskin is one 
of the most turbid and fallacious minds, and 
one of the most powerful masters of style of 
the present century, * * * The Pre- 
Raphaeliteswho got all their leading principles 
from Ruskin, went further. They misunder- 
stood his misunderstandings. He had simply 
said that defectiveness in form can be 
counterbalanced by devotion and noble 
feeling in the artist. They, however, raised 
it to the position of a fundamental principle, 
that in order to express devotion and noble 
feeling, the artist must be defective in form. 
* * * If any human activity is individualistic 
it is that of the artist. True talent is always 
personal. In its creations it reproduces itself, 
its own views and feelings, and not the 
articles of faith learned from an aesthetic 
apostle. If Goethe had never written a line 



DEGENERATION 71 

of verse, he would all the same have remained 

a man of the world, a man of good principles, 

a fine art connoiseur, a judicious collector, a 

keen observer of nature. Lombroso, a very 

great authority, says of degenerates: "If 

they are painters, then their predominant 

attribute will be the color sense: they will be 

decorative. If they are poets they will be 

rich in rhyme, brilliant in style, but barren of 

thought; sometimes they will be decadents. ,, 

In this connection it may be said that the 

curious style of some artists of this generation, 

notably Monet and his school bears out the 

above statement. Nordau says of Monet: 

Thus originate the violet pictures of 

Monet and his school which spring from no 

actual observable aspect of nature, but from 

the subjective view due to the condition of the 

nerves. When the entire surface of walls in 

salons and art exhibitions of the day appears 

veiled in uniform half-mourning, this 

predilection for violet is simply an expression 

of the nervous debility of the painter. 

Of our own decadents only Walt Whitman 

is taken; perhaps the crop is too small and too 

immature to merit reaping. This belittlement 

of those who are spared may be deserved, and 



72 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

yet if Nordau could have read our Tigerish 
Affection Poetry, our Poetry of Cold Soggy 
Dreams, or our Small Poetry for Big Maga- 
zines, he might have found a trace at least of 
the deadly virus of degeneration. We do not 
worship overmuch our home-born degenerates. 
Some of our attempts at literature are puerile, 
imitative, and vacuous enough, but it is the 
silly madness and unreason of childhood rather 
than the rancid ripeness and putrescent 
maturity of old-world degeneration. You can 
readily distinguish between the childish prattle 
of the kindergarten, and the awful adult babble 
and clamour of the madhouse. 

Our small-and-early literature is so desicated 
and unfattened in its life, that it cannot 
spoil ; there is nothing in it for decay to feed 
upon, and so it dies without the grosser tokens 
of mortality. The diseases of degeneration 
must draw nutriment from something having 
life and power, even though it be of a degraded 
sort. We have no madmen with burning 
brains, like Tolstoi, crying in our wilderness; 
they belong to an older civilization. Our erotic 
literature has a brief and transitory life; it is 
infected with a thin, washed-out, enfeebled and 
innocuous depravity that is impotent to do 



DEGENERATION 73 

harm except among school children. Its makers 
put it up in imitation of Zola, Rossetti and 
Swinburne, who are as eagles to these midges. 
The nympho-maniacal young women who write 
prose and verse for the patient American public 
deserve to be put in straight-jackets, only they 
are not worth a commission de lunatico. They 
try to fly as eagles but cannot clear the stye 
where they seem to live. 

Nordau digs up the early remains of the 
Pre-Raphaelites to point his moral. This 
Brotherhood is referred to as an instance of how 
men of real talent can indulge in grotesque 
affectation. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman 
Hunt and Millais formed the Pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood in 1848; Collinson and Stephens, 
two painters and Woolner, the sculptor, joined 
later. For a time they marked all their work 
P. R. B. Nordau says of them : 

In course of time the Pre-Raphaelites 
laid aside many of their early extravagances. 
Millais and Holman Hunt no longer practice 
the affectation of willfully bad drawing and 
of childish babbling in imitation of Giotto's 
language. * * * They did not paint sober 
visions but emotions. They therefore intro- 
duced into their pictures mysterous allusions 



74 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

and obscure symbols which have nothing- to 
do with the visible reality. 
Nordau defines Pre-Raphaelitism thus : 

It is true that the Pre-Raphaelites with 
both brush and pen betray a certain, though 
by no means exclusive predilection for the 
Middle Ages; but the mediaevalism of their 
poems and paintings is not historical but 
mythical, and simply denotes something 
outside time and space — a time of dreams 
and a place of dreams, where all unreal 
figures and actions may be conveniently 
bestowed. That they decorate their un- 
earthly world with some features which may 
remotely recall mediaevalism; that it is 
peopled with queens and knights, noble 
damozels with coronets on their golden hair, 
and pages with plumed caps — these may be 
accounted for by the prototypes which, 
perhaps unconsciously, hover before the eyes 
of the Pre-Raphaelites. 

Rossetti finally becomes a man of letters, 
dominated possibly by his name. William 
Morris joins the Pre-Raphaelites, and I am 
reluctantly compelled to say that he has, on one 
occasion at least, stolen something besides in- 
spiration from the "mournful Tuscan's haunted 



DEGENERATION 75 

rhyme." This practice of conscripting a 
blessed damozel out of the Middle Ages to do 
duty in poetry is common with Rossetti and his 
school. Tennyson — a healthy poet, teaches us 
that a simple maiden in her flower, is worth a 
hundred blessed damozels. 

In Rossetti 's poem Troy Town, the refrain 
"O Troy Town," and "O Troy's down," and 
"Tall Troy's on fire, " is tacked on as the alien 
and unassisting tail-piece to each one of fourteen 
strophes. Thus: 

Helen knelt at Venus' shrine, 

[O Troy Town!] 
Saying, "A little gift is mine, 
A little gift for a heart's desire, 
Hear me speak and make me a sign! 
[O Troy's down, 
Tall Troy's on fire!]" 
Nordau says: 

He is ever muttering as he goes, 
monotonously as in a litany, the mysterious 
invocations to Troy, while he is relating the 
visit to the temple of Venus at Sparta. 
Sollier has the proposition that : 

A special characteristic found in literary 
mattoids, and also, as we have seen, in the 
insane, is that of repeating some words or 



76 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

phrases hundreds of times in the same page. 
His twin brother, Swinburne, is called 
upon for his contribution to the poetical crazy 
quilt : 

We were ten maidens in the green corn, 
Small red leaves in the mill-water; 

Fairer maidens never were born, 

Apples of gold for the King's daughter. 

We were ten maidens by a well-head, 
Small white birds in the mill-water; 
Sweeter maidens never were wed, 

Rings of red for the King's daughter. 
This mill-water is a monotonous receptacle 
for almost everything from "small white birds," 
to "a little wind,'' and it bears its variegated 
burdens through many verses to the end ; when 
the final grave is dug for the star daughter, it 
is still on duty. In the last verse "running 
rain," is cast in aqueous tautology into the 
mill-water. This practice of putting a tether 
on Fancy "skyward flying," and bringing her 
back with a jerk to the same point after every 
flight seems unnecessarily cruel and inharmon- 
ious. 

The Belgian poet, Maurice Maeterlinck, 
furnishes rare sport for this hunter of 



DEGENERATION 77 

Degenerates. From the Serves chaudes of 

Maeterlinck this sample is given : 

O hot-house in the middle of the woods. 
And your doors ever closed ! And all that is 
under your dome! And under my soul in 
your analogies! The thoughts of a princess 
who is hungry; the tedium of a sailor in the 
desert; a brass-band under the windows of 
incurables. Go into the warm moist corners ! 
One might say 'tis a woman fainting- on 
harvest-day. In the courtyard of the infirmary 
are postilions; in the distance an elk-hunter 
passes by, who now tends the sick. Examine 
in the moonlight! [O, nothing there is in its 
place!] One might say, a madwoman before 
judges, a battle ship in full sail on a canal, 
night-birds on lillies, a death-knell towards 
noon [down there under those bells], a halting- 
place for the sick in the meadows, a smell of 
ether on a sunny day. My God ! My God! 
when shall we have rain and snow and wind 
in the hot-house? 
To show how easy this is, Nordau writes 

a parody of it in this fashion : 

O Flowers! And we groan so heavily 
under the very old taxes! An hour-glass, at 
which the dog barks in May; and the strange 



78 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

envelope of the negro who has not slept. A 
grandmother who would eat oranges and 
could not write! Sailors in a ballroom, but 
blue! blue! On the bridg-e this crocodile and 
the policeman with the swollen cheek beckons 
silently! O two soldiers in the cowhouse, 
and the razor is notched ! But the chief prize 
they have not drawn. And on the lamp are 
ink spots! 

Nordau despairingly asks: "Why parody 
Maeterlinck? His style bears no parody, for 
it has already reached the extreme limits of 
idiocy. Nor is it quite worthy of a mentally 
sound man to make fun of a poor devil of an 
idiot." 

Zola and his school do not escape 
punishment. 

M. Zola boasts of his method of work ! all 
his books "emanate from observation." The 
truth is that he has never "observed;" that 
he has never, following- Goethe "plunged into 
the full tide of human life," but has always 
remained shut up in a world of paper, and 
has drawn all his subjects out of his own 
brain, all his "realistic" details from news- 
papers and books read uncritically. * * * 
His eyes are never directed towards nature 



DEGENERATION 79 

or humanity, but only to his own " Ego. " In 
order that the borrowed detail should remain 
faithful to reality, it must preserve its right 
relation to the whole phenomenon, and this 
is what never happens with M. Zola. To 
quote only two examples: in Pot-Bouille, 
among the inhabitants of a single house in 
the Rue de Choiseul, he brings to pass in the 
space of a few months all the infamous things 
he has learnt in the course of thirty years, by 
reports from acquaintances, by cases in 
courts of law, and various facts from news- 
papers about apparently honourable bour- 
geois families; in La Terre, all the vices 
imputed to the French peasantry or rustic 
people in general, he crams into the character 
and conduct of a few inhabitants of a small 
village in Beauce ; he may in these cases have 
supported every detail by cuttings from 
newspapers, or jottings, but the whole is not 
the less monstrously and ridiculously untrue. 
I allowed myself for thirteen years to be led 
astray by his swagger, and credulously 
accepted his novels as sociological contribu- 
tions to the knowledge of French life. The 
family whose history Zola presents to us in 
twenty mighty volumes is entirely outside 



80 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

normal daily life, and has no necessary 
connection whatever with France and the 
Second Empire. It might just as well have 
lived in Patagonia and at the time of the 
Thirty Years' War. 

Nordau says that the history of one family 
of criminals in France has supplied M. Zola 
with material for all of his novels. It is 
comforting to know that the human beasts 
described in works like La Terre are selected 
cases. Thinking that they were samples of the 
French people, I have felt like giving voice to 
Byron's adjuration, slightly paraphrased: 
Arise ye Teutons and glut your ire. 
A land peopled with Zola's characters 
would be a carcass that even vultures would 
disdain. 

Nordau says of Friedrich Nietzsche : 

As in Ibsen eg"o-mania has found its poet, 
so in Nietzsche it has found its philosopher. 
The deification of filth by the Parnassians 
with ink, paint and clay; the censing among 
the diabolists and decadents of licentious- 
ness, disease and corruption; the glorification, 
by Ibsen of the person who "wills," is "free" 
and "wholly himself" — of all this Nietzsche 
supplies the theory, or, something which 



DEGENERATION 81 

proclaims itself as such. * * * From the 
first to the last page of Nietzsche's writings 
the careful reader seems to hear a madman, 
with flashing eyes, wild gestures, and 
foaming mouth, spouting forth deafening 
bombast; and through it all, now breaking 
out into frenzied laughter, now sputtering 
expressions of filthy abuse, and invective, 
now skipping about in a giddily agile dance, 
and now bursting upon the auditors with 
threatening mien and clenched fists. 
Nietzsche evidently had the habit of throwing 
on paper with feverish haste all that passed 
through his head, and when he had collected 
a heap of these snippings, he sent them to the 
printer and there was a book. * * * It 
remains a disgrace to the German intellectual 
life of the present age, that in Germany a 
pronounced maniac should have been 
regarded as a philosopher and have founded 
a school. In proof of the correctness of the 
foregoing criticism I take a passage from 
Zarathustra. 

"The world is deep and deeper than the 
day thinks it. Forbear! forbear! I am too 
pure for thee. Disturb me not! Has not 
my world become exactly perfect? My flesh 



82 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

is too pure for thy hands. Forbear, thou 
dull doltish and obtuse day! Is not the 
midnig-ht clearer? The purest are to be 
lords of the earth, the most unknown, the 
strongest, the souls of midnig-ht who are 
clearer and deeper than each day. * * * 
My sorrow, my happiness are deep thou 
strange day; but yet I am not God, no Hell 
of God; deep is their woe. God's w T oe is 
deeper, thou strange World ! Grasp at God's 
woe, not at me! What am I? A drunken 
sweet lyre — a lyre of midnight, a singing 
frog understood by none, but who must 
speak before the deaf, O higher men! For 
ye understand me not! Hence! Hence! 
O Youth!" etc. 

It would make too lengthy a review to do 
more than refer to what Nordau says of the 
other French degenerates. Among them, is 
Verlaine, who was in prison for two years for a 
hideous crime; with this preparation he comes 
forth and establishes a school or cult in litera- 
ture. Stephane Mallarme was admired as a 
great poet in certain circles in France, but affected 
silence, with the pretension that it was indeli- 
cate and vulgar to expose his naked soul in 
print. From the top of the pedestal where his 



DEGENERATION 83 

worshippers placed him he stimulates their 
adoration by speechless posturing, leaving them 
to read without the aid of the ink-well the great 
thoughts which they credulously attribute to 
him. With these comes Moreas, another leader 
of the Symbolists. Leaving France, we fly at 
higher game in Tolstoi. Nordau says of him: 
He has become in the last few years one 
of the best known, and apparently, also, one 
of the most widely read authors in the world. 
Every one of his words awakens an echo 
among all the civilized nations on the globe. 
His strong influence over his contemporaries 
is unmistakable. The universal success of 
Tolstoi's writings is undoubtedly due in part 
to his high literary gifts. * * * Tolstoi 
would have remained unnoticed like any 
Knudson of the seventeenth century, if his 
extravagances as a degenerate mystic had 
not found his contemporaries prepared 
for their reception. The wide-spread hys- 
teria from exhaustion was the requisite soil 
in which alone Tolstoi could flourish. In 
England it was Tolstoi's sexual morality 
that excited the greatest interest, for in that 
country economic reasons condemn a formid- 
able number of girls, particularly of the 



84 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

educated classes, to forego marriage; and 
from a theory which honored chastity as the 
highest dignity and noblest human destiny, 
and branded marriage with gloomy wrath 
as abominal depravity, these poor creatures 
would naturally derive rich consolation for 
their lonely, empty lives and their cruel 
exclusion from the possibility of fulfilling 
their natural calling. The Kreutzer Sonata 
has, therefore, become the book of devotion 
of all the spinsters of England * * * 
Lombroso instances a certain Knudson, a 
madman, who lived in Schleswig about 1680 
and asserted that there was neither a God 
nor a hell; that priests and judges were 
useless and pernicious, and marriage an 
immorality; that men ceased to exist after 
death; that every one must be guided by his 
own inward insight, etc. Here we have the 
principal features of Tolstoi's cosmology 
and moral philosophy. Knudson has, how- 
ever, so little pointed out leading the way to 
those coming after, that he still only exists 
as an instructive case of mental aberation 
in books on diseases of the mind. 
Nordau's work would be incomplete with- 
out an exposition of Ibsenism. He says of Ibsen 



DEGENERATION 85 

That Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great 
verve and power is not for a moment to be 
denied. He is extraordinarily emotive, and 
has the gift of depicting- in an exceptionally 
life-like and impressive manner that which 
has excited his feeling's. * * * Similarly 
it must be acknowledged that Ibsen has 
created some characters possessing a truth 
to life and a completeness such as are not to 
be met with in any poet since Shakespeare. 
Gina, in The Wild Duck, is one of the most 
profound creations of world-literature — 
almost as great as Sancho Panza, who 
inspired it, Ibsen has had the daring to 
create a female Sancho, and in his temerity 
has come very near to Cervantes, whom no 
one has equalled. If Gina is not quite so 
overpowering as Sancho, it is because there 
is a wanting in her his contrast to Don 
Quixote. 

Through many pages of Nordau Ibsen is 
dissected and examined. Ibsen's childish ig- 
norance of the simplest facts taught by modern 
science; his silly expositions and illustrations of 
the effect of heredity; his habit of mounting 
little hobbyhorses that have already been ridden 
to death by the authors of the Sunday-school 



86 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

literature of a generation back; the artless 
discussions carried on by his characters, of 
delicate and complex social problems, are all 
given by Nordau as signs of degeneration. 

I should rather say that these things were 
proofs that Ibsen was a mere dreamer, lacking 
accuracy; one who was but a shallow student 
of facts and social problems, and who has had 
but slight training as a man of the world and 
of affairs. He has but a dry and tedious closet- 
wisdom, yet it is sugar-coated at times with his 
rare poetic and dramatic gifts. It would be a 
far deduction to say that these faults denoted 
degeneration. They rather strongly prove 
the vaguely nebulous condition of thought, 
incident to one in his non-age. His ideas of 
sacrifice, of expiation for sin ; his doctrine that 
men and women must live out their lives, which 
he explains to mean that they should follow 
their own sensual or selfish impulses no matter 
at what cost or shame to others; his open 
abandonment of all these theories and the 
advocacy of their opposites from time to time 
as fits his mood, are certainly marks of mental 
and moral perversion. If he have a sound 
lesson on the necessity of right living, to-day, 
he is sure to contradict it on some other day 



DEGENERATION 87 

with guileless and shameless inconsistency. 
His career is like that of the Libyan who wished 
to become a god. With this purpose he caged a 
large number of parrots and taught them to 
say "Apsethus, the Libyan is a god." Then 
he set them loose and they spread all over 
Lybia, and repeated in every wood what he 
had taught them. The Libyans not knowing 
of his trick were astounded and finally came to 
regard him as a god. Nordau uses this story 
as illustrative of Ibsen, and adds: 

In imitation of the ingenious Apsethus, 
Ibsen has taught a few "comprehensives, " 
Brandes, Eberhards, Jaegers, etc. — the 
words 4 'Ibsenis a modern," "Ibsen is a poet 
of the future," and the parrots have 
spread over all the lands and are chat- 
tering with deafening dinin books and 
papers, "Ibsen is great!" "Ibsen is a 
modern spirit!" and imbeciles among the 
public murmur the cry after them, because 
they hear it frequently repeated, and because 
on such as they, every word uttered with 
emphasis and assurance makes an impression. 
No enthronement however high is safe 
from Nordau; he invades temples that a 
humbler critic may not enter even on tiptoe. 



88 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

He confronts the mighty Wagner in his pride of 
place and shows the plague-spots in his 
character. I copy only a fragment from this 
arraignment: 

The shameless sensuality which prevails 
in his dramatic poems has impressed all his 
critics. Hanslick speaks of the "bestial 
sensuality" in Rheingold, and says of 
Siegfried: "The feverish accents so much 
beloved by Wagner, of an insatiable 
sensuality, blazing- to the uttermost limits — 
this ardent moaning, sighing, crying, sinking 
to the ground, move us with repugnance. 
The text of these love-scenes becomes some- 
times in its exuberance, sheer nonsense." 
Compare in the first act of the Walkure, in 
the scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde, 
the following stage direction : "Hotly inter- 
rupting;" "embraces her with fiery passion," 
"in gentle ecstacy," "she hangs enraptured 
upon his neck;" "close to his eyes;" "beside 
himself; " "in the highest intoxication, " etc. 
At the conclusion, it is said "the curtain falls 
quickly, " and frivolous critics have not failed 
to perpetrate the cheap witticism, "very 
necessary, too. " The amorous whinings, 
whimperings and ravings of Tristan and 



DEGENERATION 89 

Isolde, the entire second act of Parsifal, in 
the scene between the hero and the flower- 
girls, and then between him and Kundry in 
Klingsor's magic-garden, are worthy to rank 
with the aboye passages. It certainly 
redounds to the high honour of German pubic 
morality, that Wagner's operas could have 
been publicly performed without arousing 
the greatest scandal. How unperverted 
must wives and maidens be when they are 
in a state of mind to witness these pieces 
without blushing crimson and sinking into 
the earth for shame! How innocent must 
even husbands and fathers be who allow their 
womankind to go to these representations of 
"lupanar" incidents! Evidently the German 
audiences entertain no misgivings concerning 
the actions and attitudes of Wagnerian 
personages; they seem to have no suspicion, 
of the emotions by which they are excited, 
and what intention their words, gestures and 
acts denote; and this explains the peaceful 
artlessness with which these audiences follow 
theatrical scenes during which, among a less 
childlike public, no one would dare to lift his 
eyes to his neighbour or endure his 
glance. 



90 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

This new science of degeneration has 
enriched our vocabulary with odd grotesque 
forms of speech, but lately sprung up in the 
madhouses, dissecting rooms and hospitals; 
the doctors have been plagiarized and their 
livery stolen for the service of literature. So 
dressed forth, Nordau's clinic becomes too 
physiological for the Critics' 1 Corner in a 
ladies' magazine, even if in that locality we could 
endure so strong an antidote to the gentle 
adjacent gush. The critics who hover as 
vultures alike over the mountain peaks of 
genius and the dead plains of mediocrity will 
have rare feasting on what Nordau has left ; he 
has certainly run the game to earth for them. 

The art of criticism has always owed much 
to the earlier classics. They furnished it 
inspiration, names, titles, figures, and illustra- 
tions. One hundred and fifty years ago no 
critical discourse would have been thought 
worthy a place in letters if it did not contain 
industrious gleanings from mythology; critics 
hunted from Rome back to Troy for whips 
with which to scourge offenders against their 
laws. Homer was the most constant source of 
supply; now his verses (if I may use a bit of 
jesting vernacular, ) have become back-numbers. 



DEGENERATION 91 

I detest Smith's absurd book of essays; if I 
reviewed it in the style of the last century, I 
would call him a modern Theresites, or compare 
him to some other equally unvalued ancient ; or 
I would suggest that he had found some bog- 
hole and drank from it under the mistake that 
it was the Pierian Spring. All this is old style, 
and was very well in its day. 

With the aid of this new science, I call 
Smith a Literary Mattoid, an Egomaniac, a 
Phraseomaniac, or some other of the hospital- 
coined titles and epithets. It will be so much 
more puzzling and painful for Smith, when he 
shall find that his essays are not damned by 
the dictionary, and that in order to know what 
it is that I have called him, he must consult his 
medical man. A more serious thought that may 
well give us pause, is, what effect do these new 
discoveries have on the law of libel and slander? 
Is the term Mattoid, when applied to an 
author, actionable? What should be the rule 
of damages for an author who has been called 
an Egomaniac? Is the term Nymphomaniac 
calculated to excite an assault and breach of 
the peace, and therefore indictable? Some of 
these questions will unhappily find an answer 



92 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

in court, and I will not prejudice the final 
judgment by any hasty opinion. 

This excursion into Darkest Literature, 
has all the fascinations attending new discoveries 
in lands of strange beasts and birds and men, — 
* * * whatever title please thine ear 
Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air 
Or laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair. 
Quoting Pope is a reminder that degenera- 
tion has not yet been called the nineteenth 
century Dunciad — an omission which is, I fancy, 
entitled to some commendation. Yet prompted 
now, so strong is the habit of fashioning the 
divine parallel, we recur to that earlier Dunciad 
in search of all marks of likeness or difference. 
Pope, probably a degenerate himself, hunted 
his enemies like a ferret out of the ratholes of 
Grub Street; yet he distils his poison in courtly 
numbers and fair-sounding verse. He runs 
the Dunciad in heroic mold, and puts Thersites 
mockingly into the shining armour of Achilles. 
He compels the mongrel mob in his Kingdom of 
Dullness to walk in god-like struts before he 
jeeringly despatches them to the shades. A 
dunce is more of a dunce dressed in the 
rhetorical frippery of old gods and kings, just 
as the ass in the fable who puts on the lion's 



DEGENERATION 93 

hide thereby becomes more of an ass. Pope's 
heroic rhyme is like a parade of gloriously 
equipped warriors sent out apparently to 
honourable battle, only finally to be employed 
as catchpoles for curbstone criminals. The 
rhyming garniture of the Dunciad with its 
myriad harmonies has some obscurities that 
somewhat dim the wit after so long a time. 
There is a species of wit indigenous to time and 
place; it will not bear transplanting, and 
withers a little in a strange environment. After 
nearly two centuries have passed, we lose the 
point of much of this venom-dripping rhyme; 
the near-by audience laughed it to the echo. 
We cannot bring back that fretting, fuming 
Bohemia where Pope was king. One must 
have seen the fribbling rout of vulgar pretenders 
whom Pope- left howling, in order to take full 
pleasure in their correction. We should go 
back to Will's, and hear the daily gossip that 
ranged from the street to the chambers of 
great noblemen, to make us apt in the study 
of this devilish delicate wit. Who can interpret 
it now, or pluck the full meaning of these 
fleshless jests from their graveyard? No more 
can we tell all that Rabelais and Swift meant 
by their stupendous satires. 



94 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

As Hamlet in sad derision picked up the 
skull of poor Yorick, so do we take up the 
Dunciad. It was a thing of infinite jest once ; 
but now, where be its gibes? its gambles? its 
flashes of merriment that were wont to set the 
table on a roar? All are gone and we are 
sitting gazing at a stage-full of mere skeletons 
of jests whose appearance once shook the 
galleries. 

Nordau on the other hand has constructed 
for us a scientific treatise — a text book ; a cold 
phlegmatic analysis that will be understood in 
distant times, and without the aid of local 
history. He does not adorn his labour with 
the colouring of divine fancy as the ancients 
decked victims for the sacrifice. He does not 
waste strength on glowing verse and cunningly 
turned phrases; he has no place for these in 
his materia medica. He assumes a sterner 
task, and stands, knife in hand, coolly dissecting 
and expounding — the genius of the lecture- 
room. 



JOHN SMITH 

I FIND from my daily that the Smith family 
is to hold a reunion near Altoona on 
August 19. It is needless to say that this 
reunion will be largely attended. Those in 
charge of the affair have issued a large number 
of invitations to members of the family in all 
parts of the world. On these invitations 
appears a sort of a family tree, being a state- 
ment of the fecundity and antiquity of the 
Smiths. It states that the name antedates the 
building of King Solomon's Temple by forty 
years, and the Christian era by 1855 years. 
There will doubtless be presented at this 
reunion, a book of Chronicles of the Smith 
Family, compiled by some enthusiastic Smith, 
with veracious accounts of how knightly de 
Smiths won honour in many great battles from 
Leuctra to Agincourt. Letters are to be read 
at this gathering from famous absent Smiths 
and addresses made by famous attendant 

95 



96 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Smiths. "Invitations," so my account runs, 
"have been sent to the Italian Smithis, the 
Spanish Smithos, the German Schmidts, 
the French Smeets, the Russian Smithtowskis, 
the Greek Smikons, and the Turkish Seefs. " 
I cannot find from this legend whether the 
invitations were sent to the Smythes, and the 
Smithes, but these aristocrats may have been 
omitted from this felicitation, by the plain 
Smiths, who constitute the majority of the 
clan. Caste is a dreadful thing, but it seems 
to have crept like an alphabetical serpent into 
the Smith family in the form of the interpolated 
y or e. To those afflicted with this aristocratic 
addition, I would say that the greatest member 
of the Smith family was plain Smith, with his 
name-plainness still further accentuated by the 
Christian name of John. Not to wear this 
matter out; — I mean Captain John Smith, who 
fought robbers in England and France, and 
pirates on the Mediterranean, who did great 
deeds against the Turk, cutting off the heads 
of three Turkish champions before the walls of 
Regall; who bore Turkish and Indian captivity 
with undaunted soul, and found in the thick 
darkness of that captivity a glowing romance 
of love; who was saved from death by an 



JOHN SMITH 97 

Indian girl, and who performed so many 
prodigies of valour as to pale "what resounds 
in fable or romance of Uther's son begirt 
with British and Armoric knights." The 
Knights of the Table Round with all their 
fabled prowess taken for true, could not show 
his fellow. He was the peer of them all, the 
courtliest, the bravest and the greatest of soul 
of all the brave gentlemen adventurers that 
England sent into far countries three hundred 
years ago. All that was said of the peerless 
Launcelot could be said of our captain: 

Thou were head of all Christian knights; 
and thou were the courtiest knight that ever 
bare shield; and thou were the truest friend 
to thy lover that ever bestrode horse; and 
thou were the truest lover of a sinful man 
that ever loved woman; and thou were the 
kindest man that ever strake with sword; 
and thou were the goodliest person ever came 
among press of knights; and thou were the 
meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate 
in hall among ladies; and thou were the 
sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever 
put spear in rest. 

Hero worship may run an unchecked course 
with this great-hearted man, for all about him 




98 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

seems to have been fine and worthy. The 
chance which selects parents for great men gave 
him those by the name of Smith as if in derision 
of the paltry birthright of a name. His parents 
followed this commonplace, in an age when 
there were plenty of Mortimers and Percys by 
giving their eaglet the name of John. It was 
later Smiths who have been tempted from the 
pathway of plain and unromatic orthoepy to 
insert the extra vowel. But our Smith could 
afford to wear his name plain, as a prince can 
afford to wear plain clothes. 

He was born of good family in Willoughby, 
Lincolnshire, in 1579. Lord Bacon, then a 
young man of nineteen, was studying law at 
one of the Inns of Court. One Sir Thomas 
Coke was in a large practice before the courts 
at Westminster; Queen Elizabeth was in the 
midst of her long and glorious reign ; and there 
was much fighting and blood-letting going on 
all over the globe. Spain was wasting the 
Netherlands with fire and sword. The Turks 
were in continual war with the nations of 
southern and western Europe. Eight years 
before Smith's birth the great battle of Lepanto 
was fought between the Turks and the 
Spanish, Italians, and Venetians under Duke 



JOHN SMITH 99 

John of Austria. Cervantes served as a 
common soldier in this battle under the banner 
of Spain. It shattered the sea-power of the 
Turks, but on land they continued to terrorize 
Europe until John Sobeski turned them back 
before the walls of Vienna one hundred years 
later. It was in this same year of 1579 that 
Sir Walter Raleigh and his half-brother, Sir 
Humphrey, sailed for America on a voyage of 
discovery under a patent from the queen, giving 
them the right "to discover and take possession 
of such remote, heathen, and barbarous lands 
as were not actually possessed by any 
Christians or inhabited by any Christian 
people. ' ' Rome was at open war with England, 
and Pope Gregory issued his famous bull 
against the heretic nation. As for Spain and 
France, war was chronic between them and 
England. Spain was then a mighty power. 
She held sway over a portion of Italy and over 
the Low Countries. Her generals were able 
and ruthless. She had plundered the New 
World of countless treasure in gold and silver, 
and scores of her galleons were engaged in 
bringing the spoil home. A papal decree gave 
the New World to Spain, but Englishmen were 
hurrying to dispute this claim. It was in 1580 

LoFC. 



100 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

that Drake dropped anchor in Plymouth 
harbour, having completed the circuit of the 
globe, bringing back with him half a million 
of Spanish treasure. Queen Elizabeth honoured 
the great freebooter with knighthood, and 
wore some of the jewels he had taken from the 
Spaniard in her crown. This was one of the 
causes that led Philip to send the great Armada 
against England, a few years later. By the 
queen's command Drake again despoiled the 
Spanish cities in the New World. In these 
stirring times young Smith grew up. The 
tales of Drake's adventures, and of the struggle 
in the- Netherlands, and of the Armada with 
its wreck of ships strewn along the Scottish 
coast, must have inflamed his youthful imagina- 
tion, for at the age of thirteen, he sold his 
books and satchel and started to run away to 
sea. His father's death, however, kept him 
at home for a time, and his guardians, solid 
business men, would have none of youthful folly 
and so apprenticed him to a merchant at Lynn. 
This merchant tyrannically refused to allow his 
apprentice to go to sea, and so Smith went 
without leave to France with a son of Lord 
Willoughby. From there he went to the 
Netherlands where there was good fighting and 



JOHN SMITH 101 

engaged with the Spaniards for three or four 
years, under an Englishman, one Captain 
Druxbury, who was in the service of Prince 
Maurice. He finally sailed for Scotland, was 
shipwrecked on the voyage, but escaped without 
harm, and came again to Willoughby, but not 
to engage in the arts of peace. He turned 
hermit. To use his narrative: 

Where, within a short time, being glutted 
with too much company, wherein he took 
small delight; he retired himself e into a 
little woodie pasture, a good way from an} T 
towne, environed with many hundred Acres 
of other woods. Here by a faire brook he 
built a Pavillion of boughes, where only in 
his cloatbs he lay. His studie was Machiavill's 
Art of Warre, and Marcus Aurelius; his 
food was thought to be more of venison than 
anything else; what he wanted his man 
brought him. The countrey wondering at 
such an Hermite * * * Long these pleasures 
could not content him, but he returned againe 
to the Low-Countreyes. 

This effort not to commit himself directly 
to the venison, seems to have been out of 
delicate respect for the game laws which were 
then hanging matter. Hence the expression 



102 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

"His food was thought to be more of 
venison, — " as if he was simply giving the 
neighbourhood rumour, rather than admitting 
a fact against himself. In going into the Low 
Countries, his plan was to hunt up the Turks 
and fight with them as soon as possible. He 
thought himself fitted for this warfare for he 
says of his acquirements: 

Thus when France and the Netherlands 

had taught him to ride a Horse and use his 

Armes, with such rudiments of warre as his 

tender yeeres in those martial Schooles could 

atlaine unto; he was desirous to see more of 

the world, and trie his fortune against the 

Turkes ; both lamenting and repenting to have 

seen so many Christians slaughter one another. 

Various side adventures caused him to 

deviate from his purpose to immediately fight 

the Turks. He was nineteen years of age 

when he arrived in France. On the voyage 

over, four robbers stole his baggage, and he 

had to sell his cloak to pay his passage. He 

landed in Picardy and went in pursuit of the 

robbers. He was in great poverty, and, as 

he says : 

But wandring from Port to Port to finde 
some man-of-war, spent that he had ; and in 



JOHN SMITH 103 

a Forest, neere dead with griefe and cold, a 
rich Farmer found him by a faire Fountaine 
under a tree. This kind Pesant releeved 
him againe to his content, to follow his intent. 
Soon after he found Cursell, one of his 
robbers, and, to follow his narrative: 

His piercing injuries had so small 
patience, as without any word they both 
drew, and in a short time Cursell fell to the 
ground, when, from an ruinated Tower, the 
inhabitants seeing them were satisfied, when 
they heard Cursell confesse what had 
formerly passed. 

He next came to the chateaux of a noble 
earl in Brittany, whom he had known in 
England, and was hospitably treated there, 
and from there he journeyed over France for a 
time, surveying fortresses and other notable 
objects. At Marseilles he took a ship for Rome. 
His voyage was not a happy one and he 
describes the ship's company thus: 

Here the inhuman Provincialls, with a 
rabble of Pilgrims of divers Nations going to 
Rome, hourely cursing him, not only for a 
Hugenoit, but his Nation they swore were all 
Pyrats, and so vildly railed on his dread 
Soveraigne Queene Elizabeth, and that they 



104 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

never should have faire weather so long- as 
hee was aboard them ; their disputations grew 
to that passion, that they threw him over- 
board ; yet God brought him to that little Isle, 
where was no inhabitants, but a few kine and 
goats. 

He did not allow this indignity however, 
without breaking a good many heads. The 
next day a French ship, theBritaine bound for 
Alexandria took him off, and he grew into 
great favour with the captain. This was 
always his way ; he always landed on his feet. 
Fortune was continually reducing him to a last 
gasp and then suddenly restoring him to 
comfort and safety. Soon after, the Britaine 
fell in with a large Venetian ship with a rich 
cargo. There did not seem to be any particular 
occasion for a battle, but of course there had 
to be one, and it arose over a little discourtesy 
on the part of the Venetian. The Britaine 
hailed her and she replied with a shot that 
killed a sailor on the Britaine. A terrific battle 
ensued, out of which the Britaine came off victor. 
The Venetian ship had lost twenty men and 
was ready to sink, and so part of the cargo 
w T as transferred to the Britaine. Smith was 
no deadhead in this fight, but bore his part, 



JOHN SMITH 105 

and when it was over, he received for his share 
of the spoil "five hundred chicqueenes, and a 
little box God sent him worth neere as much 
more. " In those days piety of the approved 
sort always had Divine assistance. The spoil 
must have been great, for Smith says: 

The Silkes, Velvets, Cloth of gold and 

Tissue, Pyasters, Chicqueenes and Sultanies, 

which is gold and silver, they unloaded in 

four and twentie houres, was wonderfull; 

whereof having sufficient, and tired with toile, 

they cast her off with her company, with as 

much good merchandise as would have 

fraughted another Britaine, that was but two 

hundred Tunnes, she foure or five hundred. 

He landed at Piedmont and thence traveled 

through Italy, into Dalmatia and Albania. At 

Rome he said it was "his chance to cee Pope 

Clement the eight, with many Cardinalls, 

Creepe up the holy Stayres, w T hich they say 

are those our Saviour Christ went up to Pontius 

Pilate. " He was still eager to fight the Turks, 

and finally came to the court of Archduke 

Ferdinand of Austria, "where he met an 

English man and an Irish Jesuite; who 

acquainted him with many brave Gentlemen of 

a good qualitie. " Soon after he joined the 



106 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

army, the Turks beseiged Olumpagh. Smith 
suggested to Baron Kissell, one of his superiour 
officers, that he could devise a system of 
telegraphic fires and communicate with the 
beseiged. To quote from Smith's narrative: 
Kisell inflamed with this strange inven- 
tion; Smith made it so plain, that forthwith 
hee gave him guides, who in the darke night 
brought him to a mountaine, where he showed 
three torches equidistant from each other 
which plainly appearing to the Towne; the 
Governour presently apprehended, and 
answered againe with three other fires in like 
manner; each knowing the other's being and 
intent; Smith, thought distant seven miles, 
signified to him these words; On Thursday 
at night I will charge on the East, at the 
Alarum, salley you. Ebersbought, com- 
mander of the city, answered that he would, 
and thus it was done. 

Smith has preserved for us the alphabet 
and signals that he used, By means of this 
plan the Duke's army and the beseiged acted 
in concert and the Turks were defeated with 
great slaughter and compelled to raise the 
seige. In this same battle Smith contrived a 
plan to deceive the Turks as to the point of 



J O H N S M I T H 107 

attack, by arranging on a line two or three 
thousand pieces of match, which were fired all 
at once, that it might appear that there was 
the Duke's force with its matchlocks. Barely 
twenty-one years of age, after this battle, Smith 
was given command of a company of two 
hundred and fifty men. At the seige of Stowlle- 
Wesenburg in 1601, Smith's inventive genius 
was again called into play. He prepared some 
bombs by filling earthern pots with various 
explosive and inflammable substances, together 
with musket balls. These were thrown among 
the Turks from slings. He describes the 
effect : 

At midnight upon the Alarum, it was a 
fearful sight to see the short flaming- course 
of their flight in the aire; but presently after 
their fall, the lamentable noise of the 
miserable slaughtered Turks was most 
wonderfull to heare. 

Smith with most excellent naivete, entitles 
these devices thus: "An excellent stratagem 
by Smith;" "Another, not much worse." In 
this siege the Christians took the town by 
storm, "with such merciless execution, as was 
most pittiful to behold." At the battle of 
Girke, soon after, the Turks were again 



108 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

defeated, but Smith lost half his regiment. 
Appealing to his narrative again : 

Captain Smith had his horse slaine under 
him, and himselfe sore wounded; but he was 
not long unmounted for there -was choice 
enough of horses that wanted masters. 
Soon after the Christian army beseiged 
Regall in the Transylvania, a place supposed 
to be almost impregnable. Now Smith gives 
us one of the most dramatic incidents of war: 
* * * they spent neere a month in 
entrenching themselves and raising their 
mounts to plant their batteries. Which slow 
proceedings the Turkes often derided, that 
the Ordnance were at pawne, and how they 
grew fat for want of exercise; and fearing 
lest they should depart ere they could assault 
their citie, sent this Challenge to any Captaine 
in the Armie. That to delight the ladies, 
who did long to see some court-like pastime, 
the Lord Turbashaw did defie any Captaine, 
that had command of a Company, who durst 
combat with him for his head. The matter 
being discussed, it was accepted: but so 
many questions grew for the undertaking, it 
was decided by lots ; which fell upon Captaine 
Smith, before spoken of. 



JOHN SMITH 109 

With this luck to favour him, Smith rode 
before the armies and met My Lord Turbashaw 
in mortal combat, unhorsed him and cut off his 
head. 4 'The head hee presented to the Lord 
Moyses, the Generall, who kindly accepted it : 
and with joy to the whole armie he was 
generally welcome. " He tells us also that the 
"Rampieres were all beset with faire Dames, and 
men in Armes. " The ennui of the Turks not 
being sufficiently dissipated, they sent another 
challenge to Smith to meet one Grualgo, a 
friend of Turbashaw. The dauntless Smith 
took his head, and sent his body and rich 
apparel back to his friends. No more challenges 
coming from the Turkish camp, Smith took 
the initiative. " * * * to delude time, 
Smith with so many uncontradictableperswad- 
ing reasons, obtained leave that the Ladies 
might know he was not so much enamoured of 
their servants' heads, but if any Turke of their 
ranke would come to the place of com bate to 
redeeme them, should have his also upon like 
conditions, if he could winne it." Bonny 
Mulgro, a Turkish lord, accepted this challenge 
and the combatants met with great fury before 
the armies. The first advantage was with the 
Turk, and Smith lost his battle axe: 



110 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

The Turk prosecuted his advantage to 
the uttermost of his power; yet the other, 
what by the readiness of his horse, and his 
judgment and dexterity in such a businesse, 
beyond all men's expectation, by God's 
assistance, not only avoided the Turke's 
violence, but having drawne his Faulchion, 
pierced the Turke so under the Culets thorow 
backe and body, that although he alighted 
from his horse, he stood not long ere hee lost 
his head, as the rest had done. 
Smith goes on to say: 

This good success gave such great 

encouragement to the whole Armie, that with 

a guard of six thousand, three spare horses 

before each, a Turke's head upon a Lance, 

he was conducted to the Generall's Pavillion 

with his Presents. Moyses received both 

him and them with as much respect as the 

occasion deserved, embracing him in his 

armes, gave him a faire Horse richly 

furnished, a Semitere and belt worth three 

hundred ducats; and Meldritch made him 

Sergeant of his regiment. 

These valourous performances of Smith 

before the walls of Regall are worthy to be told 

of Saladin or Richard the Lion-hearted, or of 



JOHN SMITH 111 

an earlier chivalry. I cannot find that there 
were any Christian ladies watching these 
combats, but there must have been, for Smith 
never lacked all the accessories of valour. 
With the Turkish ladies watching from the 
"Rampieres, " it would have been cruel in 
Fortune, ever so kindly to Smith, not to have 
supplied the scene with tearful Christian ladies 
to welcome him back from the fearful field, to 
bind his bruises and refresh him with words of 
praise, and to rejoice over the downfall of the 
cruel Turk, the enemy of all women, Turkish 
or Christain. After a desperate struggle the 
Christian army took Regall by storm and all 
Turks that could bear arms were put to death. 
To kill Turks in those days was considered a 
work of great merit. The superfluous youth 
of every European country, thronged to do 
battle with the hated Turk. England sent 
her share of these, and Smith gives the roster 
of the English dead in the next great battle 
that was fought with the Turks — Rottenton — 
in which the Christian army was cut to pieces. 
We take up Smith's narrative: 

And thus in this bloudy field, neere 30,000 
lay; some headlesse, armlesse, and leglesse, 
all cut and mangled; where breathing their 



112 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

last, they gaue this knowledge to the world 
that for the Hues of so few, the Crym-Tartar 
neuerpaid dearer, Giue mee leaue to remem- 
ber the names of our owne Country-men with 
him in those exploits, that as resolutely as the 
best in the defence of Christ and hisGospell 
ended their dayes, as Baskerfield, Hardwick, 
Thomas Milmer, Robert Mullineaux, Thomas 
Bishop, Francis Compton, George Davison, 
Nicholas Williams, and one John, a Scot, did 
what men could doe, and when they could doe 
no more, left there their bodies in testimonie 
of their mindes; only ensign Carleton, and 
Sergeant Robinson escaped. But Smith, 
among the slaughtered dead bodies, and 
many a gasping soule with toile and wounds, 
lay groaning among the rest, till being found 
by the Pillagers, hee was able to live; and 
perceiving by his armor and habit his 
ransom might be better to them than his 
death, they led him prisoner with many 
others. 

Smith was sold into slavery at Axapolis, 
and purchased by one Bashaw Bogall, who 
sent him as a present to his mistress in 
Constantinople, assuring her that the slave 
was a great Bohemian lord whom he had 



JOHN SMITH 113 

overcome. "This noble gentlewoman," as 
Smith calls her, took a more than friendly 
interest in her sale. She could talk Italian and 
feigned herself sick that she might make 
occasion to talk with him. She was bound to 
know whether Bogall really took him prisoner, 
or whether this was a boast. Smith told 
her that he was an "English-man, onely by 
his adventures made a Captaine in those 
Countreyes. " He won her like another Othello, 
for he could say : 

She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd, 
And I loved her that she did pity them. 
He says : 

She tooke much compassion on him ; but 
having no use for him, lest her mother should 
sell him, she sent him to her brother, the 
Tymor Bashaw of Nalbritz in the Countrey 
of Cambia, a province of Tartaria. * * * 
To her unkinde brother, this kinde Ladie 
writ so much for his good usage, that he halfe 
suspected as much as she intended; for shee 
told him, he should there but sojourne to 
learne the language, and what it was to be a 
Turk, till time made her Master of her selfe. 
The brother was very wroth that his sister 
should entertain an affection for a Christian 



114 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

dog, and so he treated Smith with great cruelty, 
put him in irons and made him a slave of other 
slaves. He was "no more regarded than a 
beast. " Smith says of this period : 

All the hope he ever had to be delivered 
from this thraldome was only the love of 
Tragbigzanda, who surely was ignorant of 
his bad usage. 

This is his last reference to his Turkish 
mistress. Smith did not forget her, however, 
for fourteen years later when he was surveying 
the coast of New England, he named what is 
now Cape Ann, CapeTragbigzanda, after her. 
Prince Charles, with no respect for sentiment, 
changed this name to Cape Ann. Otherwise 
this sand dune would have been to this day a 
geographical monument to the gallant Captain 's 
earliest romance. How this bit of Turkish 
color on the map would have lighted up the 
horn-books. Smith finally killed his master, 
the Bashaw, with a threshing bat and made 
his way into the wilderness. After days of 
wandering and much suffering, he came to a 
Russian outpost on the river Don, and thence 
found his way into Transylvania, where he was 
received as one arisen from the dead, with great 
rejoicing. He says "he was glutted with 



JOHN SMITH 115 

content, and neere drowned with joy. " He 
came to the camp of his commander, Duke 
Sigismund. The Duke gave him a sum equal 
to five hundred pounds sterling of English 
money and a patent of arms. This patent is 
dated December 9th, 1603, and Smith had it 
recorded in the Herald's Office at London, 
August 19th, 1625. I give some of its quaint 
recitals : 

* * * we have given leave and license 
to John Smith, an English Gentleman, Captain 
of 250 Soldiers, etc. * * * Wherefore out 
of our love and favour according to the law of 
Armes, We have ordained and given him in 
his shield of Armes, the figure and descrip- 
tion of three Turks heads, which with his 
sword, before the towne of Regall, he did 
overcome, kill, and cut off in the Province of 
Transilvania. But fortune, as she is very 
variable, so it chanced and happened to him ; 
in the Province of Wallachia in the yeare of 
our Lord 1602, the 18th day of November, 
when he with many others, as well Noble 
men, as also divers other Souldiers, were 
taken prisoners by the Lord Bashaw of 
Cambia, a Country of Tartaria; whose 
cruelty brought him such good fortune, 



116 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

by the helpe and power of Almighty 
God, that hee delivered himself e, and returned 
againe to his company and fellow souldiers; 
of whom We doe discharge him, and this he 
hath in witnesse thereof, being much more 
worthy of a better reward; and now intends 
to return to his owne sweet Country. 
Smith says of this: 

With great honour hee gave him three 
Turkes heads in a Shield for his Armes, by 
Patent, under his hand and Seale, with an 
Oath ever to weare them in his V Colours, 
his Picture, [i. e., Sigismund's portrait] ib. 
Gould and three hundred Ducats, yearely for 
a pension. 

What would not some of our tuft hunters, 
who buy coats of arms and disport them in 
gaudy and meretricious state, give for the right 
to bear such a title of nobility as this? With 
all our spleen against titles, the most ardent 
republican might yield to temptation, if he 
could claim such a token of noble rank as this. 
But for one fact, I would not answer for the 
virtue of the most ambitious of the republican 
Smiths; no Smith can claim to be the lineal 
descendant of this coat of arms, for he who 
earned it with his valour, died a bachelor. 



JOHN SMITH 117 

Unless, indeed, he should have the undiscrim- 
inating pride of race of a certain worthy lady I 
once knew, who claimed to be a lineal descendant 
of Queen Elizabeth. 

After parting with Duke Sigismund, 
Smith traveled through Germany, France and 
Spain, and finally determined to go and fight 
in the civil wars in Morocco. He sailed in a 
French ship for Africa, but changed his 
purpose, and brave as he was does not hesitate 
to record that this was — 

By reason of the uncertaintie, and the 

perfidious, treacherous, bloudy murthers 

rather than warre, among those perfidious, 

barbarous Moores. 

He did not lack occasion for his courage, 
however, for presently the French ship fell in 
with two Spanish men-of-war, and they had a 
brave sea fight lasting for two days. The 
Frenchman finally beat off the Spaniards with 
the loss of an hundred men. This ends Smith's 
adventures on the continent. He returned to 
England in 1604. 

Fitting out expeditions for the New World 
had by this time become a gentleman's 
adventure, and many men of high degree joined 
in these expeditions. After the voyages of the 



118 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Cabots under English authority in 1598, 
England remained inactive in the New World 
for about one hundred years. The Cabots had 
sailed from Labrador to Florida, touching here 
and there along the coast. Yet upon this 
slender scintilla of discovery England before a 
hundred years had passed, claimed sovereignty 
over the continent from sea to sea. She was 
always equal to such claims. She calmly took 
seisin of a continent by the simple act of going 
ashore for wood, water or the casual circum- 
stances of a trade of glass beads with some 
Indians. The other European nations spent a 
century or two trying to get used to this British 
habit of claiming the most of the earth. The 
impact of the beef -eaters was too much for 
them. By right of the discovery of Cabot, who 
was the first white man to see the continent of 
North America, England wrested the Hudson 
from the Dutch and absorbed the Swedish 
settlements on the Delaware, and fought with 
France over territory for about a hundred 
years, and finally compelled her ancient enemy 
to yield up every foot of land east of the 
Mississippi. In like manner she at a later date 
reached for India, seized Australia and New 
Zealand, and innumerable islands, and will 



JOHN SMITH 119 

soon have Africa in her grasp. It is comforting 
to put the responsibility for this outreaching 
on Destiny. 

When she parted company with her children 
on this side of the Atlantic, she bequeathed to 
them a generous portion of Destiny. Americans 
took Texas from the weaker Mexicans, and 
then California. Spain yielded up Florida 
because she must have known we were bound 
to have it anyway. Napoleon probably had the 
same fear when he sold us Louisiana, for our 
western pioneers, for years before he sold it, had 
been threatening to break through the French 
barrier at the mouth of the Mississippi. We 
had an attack of Destiny lately and annexed 
Haiwaii. Next comes Porto Rico, and the 
Philippines, and by and bye, Cuba. Between 
spells we have dispossessed the Indians of nearly 
all the lands they once held. In view of our 
record it seems a huge jest to see our pharisees 
and devotees of the gospel of cant, grow tender- 
hearted over England's greed for territory. 
How we do pity the poor Boer, and the enslaved 
Hindoo. When a few missionaries' sons stole 
Haiwaii from the simple natives, we blandly 
received this acquisition and thanked God we 
are not as Englishmen are. At a time when 



120 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

we owned millions of slaves we were holding 
mass meetings to denounce the oppression of 
Ireland. Thus securely enthroned upon her 
virtuous pedestal Columbia has made great 
discoveries of motes in her neighbours' eyes. 
Occasionally she will vacate her coign of vantage 
long enough to grab a few principalities that 
may happen to be lying around loose. But her 
eyes are always rolled heavenward in holy 
contemplation of the beatitudes of "equal 
rights," and of "government by the consent 
of the governed. " All would be well and we 
should at least escape the charge of hyprocisy, 
if we would drop Cant, and boldly avow that 
England or America, or any other civilized 
nation has the right to seize and hold and 
police the lands of blood and barbarism, and 
make them a safe abiding place for native and 
stranger alike. 

After having exhausted the pleasures of 
European warfare, Smith came to England, 
and threw himself with ardour into the coloniza- 
tion of the New World. He sailed with an 
expedition for the American continent in 1606. 
On the way out he was accused of conspiracy 
and imprisoned, but on reaching America, he 
established his innocence and was liberated and 



JOHN SMITH 121 

admitted to The Council. The lives of all the 
men who plotted against him were afterwards 
at his mercy, but he spared them. Once again 
his life was attempted by secret plotters in his 
own force, but he escaped although at this time 
he was badly injured by a gunpowder explosion. 
Every schoolboy knows his adventures in 
Virginia. He was great-hearted, devoted, and 
untiring, the life and soul of the infant colonies, 
and proved that he was born for counsel as 
well as for war. He had the craft of Ulysses 
in his dealings with the Indians, and though 
he was severe towards their treacheries, he was 
humane. His treaties with them, his many 
hairbreadth escapes, his battles with them, his 
capture and rescue from death by the Indian 
maiden Pocahontas, are familiar tales. They 
cannot be recounted within the bounds of this 
sketch. Posterity has made him the central 
figure of one heroic incident, forgetting his 
many-sidedness, and the many other scenes, in 
which he faced death. As a man of letters he 
is well-nigh forgotten, although he wrote many 
histories, and a partial autobiography, wherein, 
with the modesty of a great soldier he told in 
vivid language of his perils and adventures. 
He was so modest in his first book, The True 



122 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Relation, that he did not mention the 

Pocahontas incident, and one dry-as-dust 

antiquarian has seen fit from this omission to 

throw doubt on the story. Smith was so 

familiar with death that he might well omit to 

mention all his chance meetings with it. To 

him this was only a casual circumstance, a mere 

informal passing the time of day with Death, 

and no more worthy of a chronicle than any of 

the other thrilling encounters with the great 

destroyer. No one doubted the story in his 

lifetime, and many of his contemporaries have 

testified to it. Seemingly fearful that he might 

be charged with ingratitude for making no 

record of it, in June, 1616, he addressed a letter 

to "The most High, and Vertuous Princesse, 

Queen Anne of Great Brittanie, " as follows: 

The loue I beare my God, my King and 

Countrie, hath so oft emboldened mee in the 

worst of extreme dangers, that now honestie 

doth constraine mee to presume thus farre 

beyond my selfe, to present your Maiestie this 

short discourse; if ingratitude be a deadly 

poyson to all honest vertues, I must be guiltie 

of that crime if I should omit any meanes to be 

thankful. So it is, that some ten yeeresagoe, 

being in Virginia, and taken prisoner by the 



JOHN SMITH 123 

power of Powhatan their chief e King-, I 
receiued from this great Saluage exceeding 
great courtesie, especially from his sonne 
Nantaquaus, the most manliest, comeliest, 
boldest spirit, I euer saw in a Saluage, and 
his sister, Pocahontas, the Kings most deare 
and wel-beloued daughter, being but a childe 
of twelue or thirteene yeeres of age, whose 
compassionate pitifull heart, of my desperate 
estate, gaue me much cause to respect her: 
I being the first Christian this proud King 
and his grim attendants euer saw; and thus 
inthralled in their barbarous power, I cannot 
say I felt the least occasion of want that was 
in the power of those my mortall foes to 
preuent, notwithstanding al their threats. 
After some six weeks fatting among those 
Saluage Courtiers, at the minute of my 
execution, she hazarded the beating out of 
her owne brains to sauemine; and not onely 
that, but so preuailed with her father that I 
was safely conducted to lames towne; where 
I found about eight and thirtie miserable 
poore and sicke creatures to keepe possession 
of all those large territories of Virginia; such 
was the weakness of this poore Common- 
wealth, as had the Saluages not fed vs, we 



124 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

directly had starued. And this reliefe, most 
gracious Queen, was commonly brought vs 
by this Lady Pocahontas. 
The Indian Princess fed the colonists and 
warned them of plots against them. Finally 
she came at a later day after Smith had gone 
to Europe, and they told her he was dead. 
She then married an English gentleman by the 
name of Rolf. Smith met her after her marriage 
and at first she was cool and would not speak. 
As he tells of this meeting: 

But not long after she began to talke, 
and remembered mee well what courtesies 
shee had done, saying, You did promise 
Powhatan what was yours should bee his and 
hee the like to you; you called him father 
being in his land a stranger, and by the same 
reason so must I doe you; which though I 
would have excused, I durst not allow of that 
title, because she was a King's daughter; 
with a well set countenance she said, Were 
you not afraid to come into my father's 
Countrie, and caused feare in him and all 
his people [but mee] and feare you here I 
should call you father; I tell you then I will, 
and you shall call mee childe, and so I will 
bee for ever and ever your Countrieman. 



JOHN SMITH 125 

They did tell vs alwaies you were dead, and 
I knew no other until I came to Pliraoth. 
From this it would seem that but for a 
chance estrangement, Smith would not have 
lived and died a bachelor. Although the dust 
has gathered upon his fame, he was not 
unhonoured in his own day. His companions 
in peril and his friends in England, have given 
him unstinted praise. Some of them marred 
eulogy, by putting his praises into verse, and 
we are compelled to say that none of them 
were poets. They entered into a poetical 
conspiracy of great magnitude against the 
beloved one. This is probably a sure certificate 
of fame, for no man can truly be called great 
until admiring worshippers have written poetry 
about him. It is true that many men of small 
figure come to this favour, but they make fine 
verse only a grotesque pleasantry — a tinsel 
sword and crown. But mere doggerel gains a 
dignity when it is spent in eulogy of real 
greatness, as the manhood of Ulysses shone 
through his rags and dignified them when he 
returned to his own hall. Bad as they are, I 
consider these loving eulogists worthy of some 
mention. R. Braith wait indites his verse, "To 



126 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

my worthy friend, Captain Iohn Smith." In 
this he alludes to : 

Tragabigzanda, Callamata's love, 
Deare Pocahontas, Madam Shanoi's too. 
I take the liberty of suggesting that 
for Calamata's love we read "Calamity's 
love, " believing that this is only another 
form of naming the Turkish Princess, and 
does not mean another love, and that this 
line lost its real meaning in the transcription. 
But what shall be said of "Madam Shanoi's 
too?" and was she another love, and was 
Smith a soldier of many loves? This being the 
only record of Madam Shanoi, she will have to 
be dismissed as an unimportant personage, and 
a mere casual intrusion into history. It is quite 
evident that we are warranted in maintaining 
that Smith's real loves like those of kings, made 
history, and when they did not do this they 
were the merest ephemera of the affections. 
Braithwait concludes with : 

And I could wish [such wishes would doe well,] 
Many such Smiths in this our Israel. 
Anthony Fereby, begins his verse : 
"To my noble brother and friend. " He says: 
* * * for what deservedly 
With thy lifes danger, valour, pollicy, 



JOHN SMITH 127 

Quaint warlike stratagems, abillity 

And Judgement, thou has got, fame sets so 

high 
Detraction cannot reach ; thy worth shall 

stand 
A patterne to succeeding ages. * * * 
Tuissimus Ed. Jorden, addresses his verse 
"To his valiant and deserving friend." His 
eulogy closes thus : 

Good men will yeeld thee praise; then sleight 

the rest; 
Tis best praise-worthy to have pleased the 
best. 
Richard James, speaks of his: 

Deare noble Captaine, who by Sea and Land, 
To act the earnest of thy name hast hand 
And heart; * * * 

Ma. Hawkins achieves the worst poetry, 
opening with the thrilling line : 

Thou that hast had a spirit to flie like thunder. 
Richard Meade inquires in a burst of 
poetical emotion : 

Will not thy Country yet reward thy merit; 
Nor in thy acts and writings take delight? 
In his closing line Edward Ingham avers 
that : 

Reader 'tis true; I am not brib'd to flatter, 



128 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

as if his poetry were not evidence enough on 
this point. 

M. Cartner says : 

But verse thou need'st not to expresse thy 

worth. 
He compares Smith to the famed Ithacan, 
and so also do I. C, and C. P., two unnamed 
eulogists who take a strong classical vein. 
Brian O'Rourke with true Hibernian splendour 
of diction begins with this line: 

To see bright honour sparkled all in gore. 
Salo. Tanner says: 

Let Mars and Nepture both with pregnant 
wit, 

Extol thy due deserts, lie pray for it. 
Smith offered to lead the Pilgrim Fathers 
to America in 1619, but the mission was denied 
him because he was not a Puritan. He died 
in 1631, having spent the last years of his life 
in authorship. His accounts of his life and 
explorations on this continent are filled with 
historical facts of real value. He was not too 
much of an historian to disdain small things, 
and even gives the names of his comrades and 
fellow colonists. This method of writing history 
puts the thrill of human life into what he 
relates. One cannot help but feel a friendly 



JOHN SMITH 129 

interest in the Wests, the Russells, the Burtons, 
the Bradleys, and the Walkers, and many 
others of familiar sound, for these are the 
names of people all about you. You find 
yourself wondering whether Burton, your 
shoemaker, is a descendant of the early adven- 
turer, and whether Russell your surgeon, 
derived any of his skill by inheritance from a 
soldier ancestor, who went out with Smith, 
and did his carving with the sword. As old 
Fuller quaintly says in like case, taking as his 
text the discovery of a Hastings among the 
peasantry on the Earl of Huntingdon's estate: 
And I have reason to believe, that some 
who justly own the surnames and blood of 
Bohuns, Mortimers and Plantaganets [though 
ignorant of their own extractions,] are hid 
in the heap of common people, where they 
find that under a thatched cottage which 
some of their ancestors could not enjoy in a 
leaded castle — contentment, with quiet and 
security. 

The painted walking sticks who become 
cabinet ministers, the accidents of birth who 
become kings and the accidents of politics who 
become presidents, who infest the pages of 
history with a desicated and puerile immor- 



130 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

tality, cut but a sorry figure when aligned with 
a manhood like this great captain's. The 
Genius of Platitude and Palaver has tried in 
vain to make them great; he is great because 
he has done the things, and no man ever spoke 
better of his deeds than the truth would bear. 
An English scholar, who has compiled his 
works, says of him : 

One cannot read the following- Works 
without seeing- that JohnSmith was something 
more than a brave and experienced soldier. 
Not only in his modesty and self restraint, 
his moderation and magnanimity, his loyalty 
to the King, affection for the Church, and 
love for his Country, did he represent the 
best type of the English Gentleman of his 
day ; but he was also a man of singular and 
varied ability. * * * It is not too much 
to say that had not Captain Smith of Wil- 
loughby, strove, fought and endured as he 
did, the present United States of America 
might never have come into existence. 
A pleasing eulogy to read is that of two 
of the survivors of the "starving time, " of the 
Virginia colony, as it was called. They thus 
testified to his worth : 

* * * that in all his proceedings made 



JOHN SMITH 131 

justice his first guide and experience his 

second ; ever hating- baseness, sloth, pride and 

indignity, more than any dangers; that never 

allowed more for himself than for his soldiers 

with him; that upon no danger would send 

them where he would not lead them himself; 

that would never see us want what he either 

had, or could by any means get us; that 

would rather want than borrow, or starve 

than not pay; that loved actions more than 

words, and hated falsehood and cozenage 

more than death ; whose adventures were our 

lives and whose loss our deaths. 

But the best key to his character is found 

in his written works. There in simple words 

that can charm little children, this faithful 

heart is recorded. In one burst of retrospect, 

he says : 

Having been a slaue to the Turks, 
prisoner amongst the most barbarous 
Saluages, after my deliuerance commonly 
discouering and ranging those large rivers 
and unknowne Nations with such a handfull 
of ignorant companions that the wiser sort 
often gave me up for lost, alwayes in mutinies, 
wants and miseries, blowne up with gun- 
powder; a long time prisoner among the 



132 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

French Pyrats, from whom escaping- in a 
little boat by my selfe, and adrift all such a 
stormy winter night when their ships were 
split, more than a hundred thousand pounds 
lost, they had taken at sea, and most of them 
drowned on the He of Ree, not farr from 
whence I was driven ashore in my little boat, 
&c. And many a score of the worst of winter 
moneths lived in the fields; yet to have lived 
neere 37 yeares in the midst of wars, pestil- 
ence and famine, by which many hundred 
thousand have died about mee, and scarce 
five living of them that went first with mee 
to Virginia; and yet to see the fruits of my 
labours thus well begin to prosper; though 
I have but my labour for my pains, have I 
not much reason both privately and publikely 
to acknowledge it and give God thankes, 
whose omnipotent power onely delivered me, 
to doe the utmost of my best to make his 
name knowne in those remote parts of the 
world, and his loving mercy to such a 
miserable sinner. 
Again he says: 

Who can desire more content that hath 
small meanes; or but only his merit to 
aduance his fortune, then to tread and plant 



JOHN SMITH 133 

that ground hee hath purchased by the 
hazzard of his life? If he haue but the taste 
of virtue and magnanimitie, what to such a 
minde can bee more pleasant, than planting 
and building a foundation for his Posteritie, 
gotte from the rude earth by God's blessing 
and his owne industrie, without prejudice to 
any? If hee haue any graine of faith or zeale 
in Religion, what can hee doe lesse hurtfull 
to any, or more agreeable to God; then to 
seeke to conuert those poore Saluages to know 
Christ and humanitie, whose labours with 
discretion will triple requite thy charge and 
paines? What so truely suites with honour 
and honestie, as the discouering things 
unknowne? erecting Townes, peopling 
Countries, informing the ignorant, reforming 
things vniust, teaching virtue; and gaine to 
our Native mother-countrie a kingdom to 
attend her; finde imployment for those that 
are idle, because they know not what to doe; 
so farre from wronging any, as to cause 
Posteritie to remember thee and remember- 
ing thee euer honour that remembrance with 
praise? * * * Then seeing we are not 
borne for our selues, but each tohelpe other, 
and our abilities are much alike at the houre 



134 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

of our birth and the minute of our death; 

Seeing our good deedes, or our badde, by 

faith in Christ's merits, is all we haue to 

carrie our soules to heauen, or hell; Seeing 

honour is our Hues ambition ; and our ambition 

after death to haue an honourable memorie 

of our life; and seeing by noe meanes wee 

would bee abated of the dignities and glories 

of our predecessors; let vs imitate their 

vertues, to bee worthily their successors. 

Sleep great Captain in your humble grave 

— you who were thrice worthy to be laid beside 

great kings at Westminster. No grave of 

England's dead holds more kingly dust than 

yours. We have read your story as you and 

your companions in arms have set it down. It 

is a tale of many lands and many peoples, of 

life eloquent and glorious. It brings us close 

to you and makes three hundred years seem 

but as a day. We have walked beside you as 

with satchel and shining morning face you 

crept, like snail, unwillingly to school. We have 

seen your hermitage in the woods of Lincolnshire 

where you took the queen's deer, and communed 

with Marcus Aurelius, dreaming of greatness 

like his. Dear to us is every passing fancy and 

every careless grace of that noble non-age. 



JOHN SMITH 135 

Dear and friendly are you as you lead us among 
the battle-fields of Europe, and through the 
perils that beset you. We have fearfully 
watched you careering down the lists at Regall 
to meet the flower of Turkish chivalry. We 
have felt your heart-throbs when the Turkish 
maiden made you a double captive, and we 
thought no ill of you that you honoured her 
love with your gratitude, and cherished her 
memory after many years had gone when you 
came to name the new world. Whether in 
school-boy cap and gown, or clad in mail, or 
naked in slavery, or bound before Powhattan 
awaiting his dreadful judgment, or watching 
and guarding Western Civilization in its very 
cradle-time, you were a man. 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 

TO A POETESS OF PASSION 

YOU in the Bohemia of newspaperdom must 
be constantly reminded as I am in other 
places, that the age of chivalry is not yet 
past. The pencil of the wandering hack-writer 
still does as much for the succour of distressed 
damsels seeking fame as did the lance of the 
ancient knight for his lady fair. 

The lady lawyer, I -use this term unad- 
visedly, argues her first case, and this becomes 
an event worthy of an admiring chronicle. The 
charms of toilet, the grace of manner, and the 
erudition of the fair Portia, are set forth with 
glowing eulogy. Young Briefless might argue 
twenty cases and not awaken half this interest. 
Perhaps if Portia would analyze the flattery 
offered her she might come to doubt whether it 
was entirely complimentary, and might feel 
that it carried with it a certain astonishment 
that a mere woman should do so well, instead 
of assuming this as a matter of course. But 

136 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 137 

flattery is as immune from analysis on the part 
of the greedy, as sugar-plums. The new ways 
of the sex bring multiform embarrassments, and 
your critic has not the least of these. The 
aged professor and the young medico at the 
clinic and in the dissecting room hardly know 
how to harmonize their new relations towards 
the brave intruder upon their ways. Portia in 
the court room is apt to demand all things as 
belonging to her of hereditary right, and to 
concede as few obligations on her own part, as 
possible. The seasoned practitioner hardly 
knows how much satire or brute strength he 
may use to check her, or how much deference 
he should show her when he finds her tempted 
into trickery or pettifogging. So he shuffles 
and temporizes *and evades responsibility, and 
saves his thunderbolts for the next bout with 
his learned brother. 

One cannot object to the emancipation of 
sex, but can fairly object to the self conscious 
way in which the emancipation goes on. The 
demand upon our attention by women who 
are admitted to the bar, or who write books, 
or turn politicians, or practice medicine, or do 
the other things that seem novelties to them, 
has become a bore. It is not necessary that 



138 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

these pioneers should be eternally calling atten- 
tion to the fact that they are women. Men do 
all these things, and, heaven knows, are vain 
enough about it, but they do them without the 
air of saying "You see, I am only a man, and 
yet I can do this." May we not be allowed to 
yet look on woman as a part of the great 
human family and not as a distinct species? 

Although literature is not a new field for 
women, yet the consciousness of sex follows 
them there, and becomes the worst of hyper - 
trophied mental tissue. I cannot find that 
"violet- weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho" 
was thus afflicted, and it is now nearly three 
thousand years since she sang of love. So we 
must now be in a time of retrogression. These 
prefatory observations concluded, I am pre- 
sumptious enough to think that lean, without 
violating the proper canons of gallantry sug- 
gest some reasons which may cause you to 
refrain from further poetical activity along 
certain lines. 

Some trespass on gallantry should be par- 
doned, for gallantry in our sex has been the 
bane of your life. It has spoiled any promise 
you may have shown in earlier years. I remem- 
ber when you were first putting forth your 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 139 

maiden efforts in verse. They were good 
enough rhymes to be published in the cross- 
roads weekly free of charge. It is true, as even 
you must admit, that if you thought them 
poetry you were more self-flattered than 
Malvolio. They were just plain rhymes; little 
jingles, and sometimes little jangles. I have 
tried to give them no dull-eared search, yet I 
cannot find a single line in them that is really 
yours that rings with music and power. How- 
ever, if your verse had been simply of woods, 
and hills, and streams, and summer days, and 
blossoming flowers, you would have lived 
unknown to the great world, although you 
might have been the queen of letters at the 
cross-roads . But your constituency would have 
been limited by the subscription list of the 
cross-roads weekly. Whether by accident or 
design you struck other than bucolic themes 
and opened a vein of most amatory verse, and 
this advertised you because it was excessively 
amatory. You also met a lot of good fellows, 
both young and old in the newspaper world. 
They are always lion hunters, eager to make 
new finds, and gallant and quick to extend 
help to the latest female immigrant into 
Bohemia. They gave you the freedom of the 



140 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

kingdom in two-column laudation. They bade 
Flattery play you silvery airs and agreed that 
you should be heralded as a poet. They puffed 
your poems, and, gross and palpable though it 
was, you sickened not, but under this inspira- 
tion only ground out more. They announced 
your goings and your comings, and varied the 
monotony of their efforts to give you fame by 
occasionally announcing that you were about to 
be married to a distinguished gentleman, to 
whom, with their light and playful fancy, they 
attached great place in wealth or position. 
When a mere man journeys from place to place, 
the gleaners for the press do not always attend 
upon him, unless, indeed, he should happen to 
be a criminal or some other person of equal 
importance. But if you should happen to 
make a metropolitan visit, Genial Jenkins would 
be rapping at your boudoir door within half an 
hour after your arrival. Then as surely follows 
this interview which I take from next morning's 
Daily Bangle. 

The reporter for the Bangle met with a 
pleasant reception last evening- from the 
beautiful Poetess of Passion in her charming- 
Boudoir at the Auditorium. She wore a pale 
green tea-g-own which showed to decided 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 141 

advantage her petite and symmetrical figure. 
Your reporter caught the merest tantalizing 
glimpse of a white satin slipper, together 
with its contents, peeping from the wondrous 
tea-gown. The softly shaded electric light 
shed a langorous glamour over the sparkling 
eyes and dimpled cheeks of the poetess. 

"May I ask what literary work you are 
now engaged on?" I said, after I had been 
cordially greeted. 

u O, I have concluded to write a novel of 

the Present, which will also be a novel of the 

Future," said the poetess. "It will be in 

the highest form fin de Steele . I shall give 

a realistic picture of the young man of the 

present day with all his vices. It has been 

said so often by the critics in this country 

and Europe that I could only excel in verse 

and especially in the poetry of the passions, 

that I shall now produce something worthy 

in prose, for I have really achieved all the 

fame I care for in poetry. 

Of course this is quoted from memory and 

I cannot give the literal rendering of the blank 

form used for these many interviews. But you 

have a surer authority ; turn to your scrap-book 

of newspaper clippings about yourself and you 



142 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

will find this interview there, tea-gown, slippers 
and all. They are ancient stage properties of 
yours, although of late years they have had a 
diminishing use. But puffing counts in the 
long run ; it makes prime ministers as well as 
poets. You had some commendation that was 
honest enough even though it was shallow. 
Some of the people whose good opinion you 
should have valued and respected, refused to 
read your poetry ; others read it with indigna- 
tion, and others refused to consider it seriously 
either for good or bad, but treated it with 
broad humor and blunt wit, and your muse as 
of the opera bouffe order. 

Slowly the deference of the press for you 
has become rather third class with a tinge of 
good-natured contempt in it. The newspaper 
brethren like fine titles and second names for 
every public character. They do not permit 
any Mavericks on their range, and like to put 
their own brand on the herds they round up 
from far and near. When you have been in 
their eye long enough in one capacity they fix 
a name on you. So they created the Sweet 
Singer of Michigan, and the Poet of the Sierras. 
To you they gave the name of Poetess of 
Passion, and joyed in its euphony. You have 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 143 

been one of their Cherry Sisters, and they have 
accorded you a mock deference, thinly disguised 
as real. It must be difficult some of the time 
to determine whether the flowers they throw at 
you are cabbages or roses; superficially, they 
might be either. You can hardly get much of 
a review now, no matter how burns the lava 
tide of your verse. You have become a stock 
figure as much as The Grand Old Man, or The 
Langtry Lily, and you do not need description 
or explanatory notes, or an introduction. Your 
epitomization is embodied in Poetess of Passion. 
But these are horizon fancies, and I want to 
look into the near-by heavens. 

I have a copy of your Red Book, called 
Poems of Passion. A wilder fancy than 
mine would suggest that the blushing cover 
was stirred by what it covered. The preface 
alone is worth all the labour of reading the 
book; it is a delicious bit of egotism that 
cannot be duplicated anywhere. In its opening 
sentence you say : 

Among the twelve hundred poems that 
have emanated from my too-prolific pen, there 
are some forty or fifty which treat entirely 
of that emotion which has been denominated 



144 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

"the grand passion love." A few of these 
are of an extremely fiery character. 
Then you proceed to state that you had 
issued a prior book of verse from which you 
had omitted these fiery sonnets. Now you 
describe how you were called to account for 
this most laudable expurgation, thus: 

But no sooner was the book published 

than letters of regret came to me from all 

parts of the globe, asking- why this or that 

love-poem was omitted. These regrets were 

repeated to me by so many people, that I 

decided to collect and issue these poems in a 

small volume to be called Poems of Passion. 

This picture of "friends and strangers in 

all parts of the globe, " crying out for their 

loved ones among your love-poems, is more 

affecting than authentic. It is impossible for 

the healthy mind to even imagine their grief. 

One would like to see these devotees of passion ; 

they would doubtless present some curious, if 

not instructive anthropological studies. Did 

these bitter disappointments well up in 

Thibetan Polyandry, or by the Bosphorus, or 

on the shore of Great Salt Lake, or where that 

other community of Passion Worshippers taints 

the air of the Empire State? One cannot 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 145 

locate elsewhere, any large collection of those 
who are ruled by Her of the Hydra Head. You 
confess with strange pride to the authorship of 
twelve hundred poems. The magnitude of 
your score has tempted me to investigate other 
poets to see if they make up your sum. Keats 
wrote fifty poems, Hood seventy-six, Burns six 
hundred and fifty, and Tom Moore about the 
same; Bryant, fifty, Tennyson about three 
hundred and fifty, Pope, one hundred and 
sixty, Wordsworth about eight hundred, and 
Mrs. Hemans two hundred and fifty. Surely 
these figures will still further serve to increase 
the appreciation your admirers have for your 
poems. One may be allowed to guess that 
those admirers are found pretty exclusively 
among men who have dealt in lumber or pork 
with but little time for literature. This sort 
of a business man is apt to imagine that if a 
poem is not positively bad in all ways, and if 
the mere externals of poetry have been attended 
to, it is real poetry and not a clever counterfeit. 
In the fruitfulness of your muse you excel all 
the great names of English literature. It may 
possibly be said that these figures are compiled 
from merely published poems and that there 
are others not published. If you could have 



146 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

considerately refrained in like manner we should 
not now have twelve hundred publicly 
announced poems. You have evidently lisped 
in numbers for the numbers came, although 
your numbers, unlike most of Pope's are of a 
mathematical-amorous sort. This standard 
compels us to measure poetical greatness as 
certain loyal Americans do national greatness — 
as if it were a matter of barrels of pork and 
bushels of wheat. Thus our Western Muse 
scorns her barren European sister. 

You consider it necessary to explain some of 
the poems in this book and to show why they 
were written, and in doing this you hint, not 
too obscurely, that they were inspired by some 
experiences that have come under your own 
observation. You also explain that the most 
amorous of these verses have not so bad a 
meaning as the superficial reader might impute 
to them. Now this explanation only accentu- 
ates the prevalent suspicion that these poems 
are irretrievably bad. With delicate naivete 
you say of one of them : 

Delilah was written and first published 
in 1877. I had been reading history and 
became stirred by the power of such women 
as Aspasia and Cleopatra over such grand 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 147 

men as Antony, Socrates and Pericles. 
Under the influence of this feeling- I dashed 
off Delilah, which I meant to be an expres- 
sion of the powerful fascination of such a 
woman upon the memory of a man, even as 
he neared the hour of death. If the poem is 
immoral, then the history which inspired it 
is immoral. I consider it my finest effort. 
Now if this poem is a good poem people 
don't care how you came to write it. Your 
fame is too new and garish to warrant any 
excessive curiosity on that score. Nor did the 
public need to be told that you "dashed off 
Delilah. " It is characteristic of the young 
poet to "dash off" his poems (in prefaces). It 
gives one an air of verve and fire, and careless 
excess of power to "dash off" these rough 
patterns, and makes one's muse like swift 
Camilla scour the plain. You say that if the 
poem is immoral, the history that inspired it is 
immoral. ' ' The history that inspired it, ' ' — aye, 
there's the rub; that history is immoral. 
Aspasia and Cleopatra are not characters out 
of a Sunday-school book. Socrates was a loose 
fish, and Pericles was no better than he should 
be, and we must not confound Marc Antony 
with Saint Anthony. It may be of no signifi- 



148 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

cance, but I find no poem in my Red Book 
speaking forth the woes of the wife in these 
ancient marital difficulties. If Zanthippe could 
have her epic, it might show how it was that 
she lost her temper and became the jest of the 
centuries on account of trouble over that woman 
Aspasia. As for Mrs. Pericles, she was 
probably a poor little mouse of a woman, living 
a decent humble life, and not worth comparing 
with that grand creature, Aspasia — certainly 
not worth a nineteenth century poem of passion. 
I think that Mrs. Caesar and Mrs. Antony 
could tell us some things if they had a fit 
chronicler, either in prose or verse, that would 
demoralize the halo which poetesses of passion 
have placed round the heads of those "grand 
characters. " You complete your confession as 
to this poem by stating that you consider it 
your '"finest effort. " This practice of battering 
yourself with boquets has something so colos- 
sally egotistical about it, that the critic, 
supposed to be used to the worst cases, gasps 
for breath. Returning to our text, I quote the 
finest lines of this finest effort of yours : 

She smiles — and in mad tiger fashion, 
As a she-tiger fondles her own, 

I clasp her with fierceness and passion, 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 149 

And kiss her with shudder and groan. 
And here is some more from Ad Finem, 
which you say is another of the poems which 
have been condemned so much: 

I know in the way that sins are reckoned, 

This thought is a sin of the deepest dye; 
But I know too that if an angel beckoned, 

Standing close to the throne on High, 
And you, adown by the gates infernal, 

Should open your loving arms and smile, 
I would turn my back on things supernal, 
To lie on your breast a little while, 

To know for an hour you were mine 
completely — 
Mine in body and soul, my own — 
I would bear unending tortures sweetly, 
With not a murmur and not a moan. 
Another of the Great Condemned is 
Communism and in this you express yourself 
thus : 

And on nights like this when my blood runs 
riot 
With the fever of youth and its mad desires, 
When my brain in vain bids my heart be quiet, 
When my breast seems the center of lava- 
fires, 



150 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Oh, then is the time when most I miss you, 
And I swear by the stars, and my soul and 
say, 
That I would have you, and hold you, and 
kiss you, 
Though the whole world stands in the way. 

And like Communists, mad and disloyal, 

My fierce emotions roam out of their lair; 
They hate King- Reason for being- loyal — 
They would fire his castle and burn him 
there, 
O love, they would clasp you, and crush you, 
and kill you, 
In the insurrection of uncontrol; 
Across the miles, does this wild war thrill you 

That is raging in my soul. 
As for your Convertion — it is so 
Swinburnish, or Whitmanish that I desire not 
to give it, having what you have not, a fear of 
the repressive rules of the United States postal 
department against aiding in the dissemination 
of a certain kind of literature. In the title to 
this poem you have stolen the very altar cloth 
and dyed it scarlet. Of what avail is this 
lawless, wanton, verse? It bears the stigmata 
of mental debauchery and hysteria and does 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 151 

not teach one valuable lesson. To the psycho- 
pat hist it may possess a curious scientific 
interest; but to laymen this demented verse is 
as abhorrent as the maunderings of a maniac. 
If it does express the language of a human 
heart is it not better that that language should 
remain untranslated, or at least that it should 
have no such brutal translation? Even poets 
who have compelled us to print expurgated 
editions of their poetry do not vapour in such 
trite eroticism as this. In some instances Burns 
wrote for the ale-house, evidently to win the 
applause of his pot-companions; it is vulgar 
enough too, but little redeemed by his splendid 
genius. But you nowhere find him afflicted with 
hysteria. Plain common vulgarity and coarse- 
ness carries its own antidote against harm. 
But Burns held the sacred things sacred from 
poetical defilement. There is no taint in these 
lines : 

Thou lingering star with less'ning ray, 
That lov'st to greet the early morn, 

Again thou ush'rest in the day 

My Mary from my soul was torn. 
* * * 

The golden hours on angel wings 
Flew o'er me and my dearie. 



152 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

My love is like the red, red rose 

Just newly sprung in June. 

* * * 

Had we never loved sae blindly. 

Had we never loved sae kindly, 
Never met, or never parted, 

We had n'er been broken-hearted. 

* * * 

Fare thee wee'l thou first and fairest, 
Fare thee wee'l thou best and dearest. 
Do you find in the great Scottish poet of 
the affections any trace of that tigerish affection 
that howls for its tiger mate through your 
poems? Civilized love is not a beast raging 
rampantly abroad seeking whom it may devour. 
It is not a vampire or a vulture that claws and 
tears and drinks warm blood on occasion It is 
decent and fair to look upon, and does not say 
to flaming youth — Let virtue be as wax and 
melt in her own fire. It goes with the bride in 
her happy innocence to the altar ; it guides and 
purifies the mother's heart as she watches over 
her children; it makes the dullest and homeliest 
life, noble and kindly; it follows to the end, 
and through life's last and greatest affliction it 
clings in dearest remembrance to the departed 
spirit beyond the confines of the grave. It has 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 153 

no affinity for that raging fever which you 
grow eloquent over. The great alienists would 
find something familiar in your verse. For 
such manifestations they have a name — Sadism. 
Here are some specimens of this poetic abandon 
from the German philosopher, Nietzsche: 

The splendid beast raging in its lust 
after prey and victory. Do your pleasure ye 
wantons; roar for very lust and wickedness. 
The path to one's own heaven ever leads 
through the voluptousness of one's own hell. 
How comes it that I have yet met no one 
* * * who knew morality as a problem, 
and this problem as his personal distress, 
torment, voluptousness, passion? 
You have few noble words to relieve these 
darker passages — in fact your other verse seems 
but a setting for them. Whittier said of Burns: 
And if at times an evil strain, 

To lawless love appealing, 
Broke in upon the clear refrain 
Of pure and healthful feeling, 

It died upon the eye and ear 

No inward answer gaining; 
No heart had I to see or hear 

The discord and the staining. 



154 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

This loving eulogist tells what every heart 
must feel. The Burns of the ale-house was 
also the Burns of Bonnie Doon and Afton 
Water, of the Cotter's Hearth, and Highland 
Mary. The vulgar line which comes now and 
then is but a passing shadow cast lightly on 
this shining gold of love and honour and 
plighted troth, and all the hearthstone deities. 
Your poems of peaceful refuge are too small 
and too few to give us safe escape from the 
surging riot that fills your Red Book. When 
you aim at a restful poem you are bound to 
make it a thing of silly gush and affectation, 
as like real emotion as that depicted by the 
painted, shrill-voiced belle of the music-hall 
stage. Lovers named Guilo, Lippo, Beppo, 
and Romney, and one by the Christian name 
of Paul, are the subjects of the lighter and less 
gustatory strokes of your prolific pen. Thus 
does your muse make eyes at the audience 
through the paint and tinsel : 

Yes, yes, I love thee, Guilo; thee alone, 
Why dost thou sigh and wear that face of 
sorrow? 

So I loved Romney? Hush thou foolish one — 
I should forget him wholly, wouldst thou let me; 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 155 

Or but remember that his day was done 
From that most supreme hour when first I 

met thee. 
And Paul? Well, what of Paul? Paul had 

blue eyes, 
And Romney gray, and thine are darkly 

tender. 
One finds fresh feeling's under change of 

skies — 
A new horizon brings a newer splendour. 
You play this tune with variations, here is 
another form : 

Why art thou sad my Beppo? But last eve, 
Here at my feet, thy dear head on my breast, 
I heard thee say thy heart would no more 

grieve, 
Or feel the old ennui and unrest. 

What troubles thee? Am I not all thine own — 
I, so long sought, so sighed for and so dear? 
And do I not live but for thee alone? 
Thou hast seen Beppo, whom I loved last 
year. 

Thou art not first? Nay, and he who would be 
Defeats his own heart's dearest purpose 
then. 



156 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

No surer truth was ever told to thee, 

Who has loved most, the best can love again. 

If Lippo, [and not he alone] has taught 

The arts that please thee, wherefore art 
thou sad 

Since all my vast love-lore to thee is brought; 

Look up and smile my Beppo, and be glad. 
This apish verse coined in the cheap and 
vulgar similitude of Italian love-making, soft 
and langorous, breathing of orange groves and 
summer nights, with its thees and thous put 
in to hide its verbal poverty, must have been 
thought poetry by you or it would not be in 
the Red Book. According to this, life in order 
to be at its happiest must consist of a quick 
succession of casual, yet tigerish love affairs, 
the more the merrier and the more the better. 
This gospel may do for the man-about-town, 
and for his compatriots in the half-world, but 
it will hardly do to bring up a family on. This 
verse looks easy and tempting ; it fires your 
critic into parodistic emulation. Here are some 
verses which suffer in the same way, " tossed 
off, ' ' of course : 

My Beppo why dost thou complain, 
Thou hast my this year's kisses; 



A DEFERRED CRITICISM 157 

Lippo was my last year's swain, 
He took those last year's blisses. 

Why task me for a thing forgot, 
When this year I am all thine own, 

That happy past remember not, 

When me its bliss long since has flown. 

The ragbags of the past disclose 
One tangled web of silken skein 

Which other hands than thine have wove, 
But which thine own must weave again. 

Let loves be new and ever range, 

Scorning dull ey'd Satiety, 
Hunting content in change on change, 
And pleasure in variety. 
And so we take leave of the Red Book — a 
book which contains no reason for having been 
written. 



AMERICAN NOTES 

IT was many and many a year ago — for so 
the account should run with us who have 

seen fast history-making, that Dickens 
came over the sea to look at England's First- 
born. The brat was lusty, raw and ungainly, 
full of strange oaths, bumptious, arrogant and 
a braggart. These qualities made its parentage 
easily recognizable, and yet gave great offense 
to its kinsman. Being of the same blood, 
perhaps he should have treated the faults of 
extreme youth more kindly, yet time softens 
resentments, and we can now afford to laugh 
over the follies of our whelp age. He hurt our 
feelings terribly in Martin Chuzzlewit and 
American Notes, yet despite the pain of 
wounded vanity we took him into favour again. 
Those who loved him tried to condone his guilt 
by attributing it to British bull-headedness 
and ignorance. 

There is a strong suspicion now extant 
that there were Americans a few decades since, 

158 



AMERICAN NOTES 159 

who were as narrow, insular and provincial as 
the John Bulls themselves. Our average is 
better now, and still we have something to 
mend. General Choke and Jefferson Brick are 
no longer with us, but we have their modifica- 
tions in the more refined, self-styled Intense 
American. He has established the Thirty- 
second Degree of Americanism, infested by his 
class alone. Still, his vagaries are mild and 
innocuous. Sometimes they are manifested in 
a desire to run the American Flag up in all 
parts of the landscape, and I have expected 
that he would eventually adorn every corn-crib 
and smoke-house in the land with it. He has 
a theory that the daily and hourly use of the 
Flag increases patriotism. Jacob with his 
device of the peeled twigs for increasing the 
number of his flocks was not more cunning 
than our Professional Patriot with his devices 
for increasing the number of Patriots in this 
country. To the American who carries his 
patriotism in his heart and not on his sleeve, 
his country's flag tells more eloquently than 
printed page or martial song, of American 
valour — of brave men and brave deeds. If it 
be a standard scarred and torn in battle, the 
whole earth holds no inspiration like it. But 



160 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

he does not need the aid of artificial excitants 
to make him love his country and her flag. 

Recently an ex-president has come forward 
with some new renditions of Flag-Service. This 
fresh pattern of patriotism is announced by the 
fortunate magazine that secured it — at great 
expense — thus : 

It was * * * idea that the stars and 
stripes should float over every school house 
in America. Now in a stirring- article he 
carries the idea further and shows why the 
flag- should find a place over every fireplace 
in our country; what it would mean to future 
generations, and why the flag should appeal 
to every woman. 

We are further informed that "the article 
will rank with the author's most eloquent 
public utterances. " As much as we respect 
ex-presidents, we cannot avoid suspicion that 
this promised mine of rich eloquence has been 
"salted" in the advertisement. Commonplace 
at a dollar a line is too dear, even when it is the 
commonplace of an ex-president. There are 
living American women who have been taught 
patriotism in a sterner school than the Great 
American Kindergarten for Women. They 
cannot gain new inspiration from pedagogical 



AMERICAN NOTES 161 

and dilettant patriotism, addressed to a 
magazine constituency assumed to be in its 
milk teeth. The Firesides are not clamouring 
to be fed new rations of spoon-victuals by 
Eminent Hands. This nursery employment 
does not suggest a fit answer to the common, 
vacuous query, "what shall we do with our 
ex-presidents?" Let us rather continue to 
employ them for periodical deliverances of other 
platitudes whose prosperity lies in our acutely 
adoring ears. 

With all the decadence among the followers 
of General Choke and Jefferson Brick they still 
have a stifled sneer for the migratory American, 
acknowledging ancestral fealty to the great 
mother-land of nations, if he shall buy a pair 
of trousers in London. One of the minor 
regulations of the intense American is that you 
must not travel in foreign lands, or at least 
only do so under apology, before you "have 
seen all there is to see in your own country. " 
You must inspect the colorless waste between 
Saco and Waco as a condition precedent to 
foreign travel. Our intense American may be 
said to be in his richest vein when he detects 
the harmless and necessary immigrant to these 
shores bringing out the flag of his native land 



162 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

on some fete day. Only a call for troops will 
suffice for this treason. I do not forget that I 
first learned from Jefferson Brick of the Curse 
of British gold, and how it was being used to 
corrupt the free American electorate. Originally 
it was the hideous Cobden Club that was 
distributing this gold, and thereafter and more 
recently the Money Kings of Lombard Street. 
From this same well of patriotism I learned 
that before we adopt national policies we ought 
to find out what England wants us to do, and 
then not do it. Upon these activities the 
bunting trust thrives, and the voice of our 
hustings becomes a mere hysterical echo of the 
patriot cannon at Bunker Hill. 

Since Dickens was with us in 1841 many 
things have come to pass that the Muse of 
History with her large disdain for trifles has 
made no note of. She only records the big 
events in her tiresome folios and never descends 
to chronicling small beer. The real life of 
human kind has been left to gossips like Pepys, 
who have saved for us the tattle of the tea 
parties and the coffee houses. While the 
Gibbons have been telling in sonorous phrase 
of camps and courts, these humble chatterers 
have remained unemulous, telling trifling tales. 



AMERICAN NOTES 163 

They cared not a button about the dress 
parades of kings, nor were they fearsome of 
posterity. They thought it important to set 
down what they ate and drank, what they 
wore, what physic they took and how they 
dressed themselves or quarreled with their 
neighbours, or amused themselves on yesterday. 
The trial of the Seven Bishops will not lack a 
historian, but we must look to these gleaners 
of little sheaves, if we wish to know what Hodge 
was doing, or how 'Arry and 'Arriet spent the 
holidays in the English meadows in the year 
16 — . There is a suggestion in this for modest 
chroniclers of our own time, who are willing to 
wait two hundred years for fame. As topics 
for these little histories I would suggest in 
passing : 

The Rise and Fall of the Crazy Quilt. 

The Age of Plush. 

The Influence of Pie on National 
Character. 

The Moral Aspect of Tidies . 

The Strange Career of the Pillow Sham. 

Disquisitions on these subjects, sagely 
written would in time become as valuable as 
those of the older Tattlers and Spectators. I 
consider My Lady Lizzard's Tucker, and 



164 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

the gentle follies of Clarinda and Bubalina, as 
worthy of a memoir as the stilted performances 
of a fat-witted prime minister. 

Dickens saw us before we had stolen Texas 
or the Empire of the Golden Gate from poor 
Mexico. It was before the Argonauts of '49 
had commenced to thread the buffalo trails over 
the plains and to hunt the passes of the 
Sierras. Our line of expansion was into the 
fever-and-ague belt of the Mississippi Valley. 
The City of Eden in Martin Chuzzlewit was 
undoubtedly a much exaggerated caricature of 
the reality, just as Bumble the beadle, the 
Parish Workhouse, or Doctor Squeers' School 
were exaggerations. But in none of these 
would you have the least trouble in finding the 
original. Jefferson Brick and General Choke 
and the New York Daily Sewer and the Rowdy 
Journal, were not all a myth. The criticism of 
Dickens touched us where we were most 
sensitive. We always had an inner feeling that 
slavery was an abomination. We dimly saw 
that in its atrocities the fifth century lived 
again and mocked at number nineteen — the 
great pharisee of the centuries. Dickens came 
from a nation whose war-ships had patrolled 
the African coast in crushing the slave trade 



AMERICAN NOTES 165 

when this century was young. Through our 
assertiveness and Fourth of July declamation, 
we must have felt that our nation was yet 
unripe and that our morals might be bettered. 
Hence our anger when the exposed nerve was 
touched bv our kinsman. 

Our jingoes were offensive and truculent 
and they could smell the blood of an English- 
man at a considerable distance, and long for it. 
They wreaked a ruder and more brutal 
vengeance on the Lion, than now, and the 
spleen and hatred engendered by two wars was 
invigorated by the presence of the crippled 
veterans of the Revolution who were disposed 
on all Fourth of July platforms. So buoyant 
and joyous and obtuse was our national conceit 
that we saw no incongruity in prating of liberty 
and freedom, while we were holding millions of 
human beings in slavery. We furnished rare 
sport for a satirist like Dickens, who had never 
spared his own country a deserved gibe. 

The genius which described the Circum- 
locution Office, the abuses of the courts, and 
the Parish Workhouses and Charity Schools of 
England would naturally riot in the wealth of 
raw material found here. 'Tis a vain task to 
balance all the gains and losses of fifty years. 



166 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

It must be admitted that when Dickens first 
saw us we were somewhat imperfect in the use 
of the fork, and we ate our meals with such 
dispatch that one who sat at meat more than 
ten minutes was looked on as a person of 
sedentary habits. We frescoed the floors in 
public places with tobacco, and the hotel towel 
was the subject of frequent and acrimonious 
remark. Pie was still our national dish and 
dominated all more effete refections from 
Passamaquaddy to Carondelet. 

Life in 1841 had some advantages however. 
The Fifth Empire of the Distended Hoop was 
still in the womb of Fashion. Women did not 
adorn their backs and heads with the monstrous 
pads of a later time. The Age of Plush had 
not yet arrived. The Japanese gewgaws, and 
Chinese decorative misfits, the hand-painted 
china and ceramic fads, the hideous tidies and 
inflammable strawstack lamp chimneys, and 
above all, the crazy quilt, were unknown. 
Woman partook of literature in those golden 
days by the simple method of sitting down and 
reading a book. She did not pursue Culture 
with a Club, bristling with constitutions and 
by-laws and presidents and vice-presidents and 
boards of directors and committees and a 



AMERICAN NOTES 167 

general hurrah and whirl of parliamentary 
practices. She did not chastise the Tyrant 
Man, with the vigor recently shown. She did 
tatting, crocheting and penwipers and woolly 
dogs. If she was literary she wrote nice stories 
for whatever magazine was the embryonic 
Ladies' Home Journal of the time. She did 
not ''wallow" in conventions and congresses 
then as now. It was a day when the sepulchral 
Best Room was the good housewife's shrine, 
and the what-not and the fair, round center- 
table, were her household gods. 

If a reincarnated Dickens should return 
here, he might still find some food for satire. 
We should probably accept his corrective offices 
more kindly now in these days of close fraterni- 
zation between the Lion and the Eagle. On 
the way over he would be sure to meet a young 
lady — one of Cook's, from Cherry Valley, 111., — 
who would pester him for his autograph. He 
would have to triple-plate himself in dogged 
British reticence to withstand the assaults of 
our indefatigable reporters. The Lotos Club 
or some other club would feast him, and smooth 
lawyers and well-fed brokers of a literary turn, 
would smother him with after-dinner adulation. 

In his purblind British way he would seek 



168 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

to find out something about New York politics. 
He would see Piatt and Croker in their busy- 
whirls and would never be able to tell which 
was which. Among other reflections, he would 
conclude that this was the Age of Woman, and 
that this gentle metal was to take its place in 
the social formation with stone and gold and 
iron. We have woman's magazines and news- 
papers, and woman's corners, and woman's 
supplements to great dailies, and woman's clubs 
and conventions and congresses, and a woman's 
revision of the Bible, and a religious cult 
established by a woman, principally for women. 
The Pilgrim Mothers having been non- 
progressive in their day, a movement has been 
organized to rescue them from obscurity, and 
to compel equal mention for them with the 
Pilgrim Fathers. We have woman doctors, 
and lawyers, and drummers and undertakers. 
We are industrously building up a separate 
literature for woman, strictly antiseptic and 
free from coarse rude things. Letters are 
becoming Bokized — male and female created 
he them. Perhaps the time will come when 
we have sufficiently segregated woman from the 
great human family, that it will be considered 
as improper for men and women to read each 



AMERICAN NOTES 169 

other's literature, as it is now for them to wear 
each other's clothes. The Expurgated Novel 
has appeared, evidently censored by the Order 
of Decayed Clergymen. Ladies' magazines are 
edited with the camera, and the kodac is 
mightier than the pen. The Genius of Tatting 
is at the helm. With all this favour to The 
Young Person, the newspaper still brings its 
daily muck of crime into our homes; although 
but lately Dickens' novels w T ere excluded from 
a New England public library as immoral. 
Having once reaped so well in our field of folly, 
Dickens, if he could return would get good 
gleanings from the aftermath of that field. 

But perhaps Dickens would be best 
charmed with Chicago — behemoth, biggest 
born of cities, the chief shrine in the Gospel of 
Bigness. Here, as in all other places where the 
sole of his un blest British feet should seek 
rest, he would be compelled to ''see the 
town." This rite of American hospitality 
would not be omitted, either in Chicago, or 
Oshkosh, Kalamazoo or Topeka. No matter 
what the town was, or how little there w r as to 
see, he would have to undergo this supreme 
ordeal. He would have to go and gaze 
admiringly at factories and shops and other 



170 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

monuments to civic pride. Seeing the town in 
Chicago would certainly embrace the stock- 
yards, where as the prideful native informs all 
strangers, they kill a hog a second, the year 
round. The reporters would give out that he 
was "very much impressed with Chicago." 
That is the way in Chicago; the traveler from 
Mars, the New Zealander, the man from poor 
old London, and from poorer old New York, is 
always "very much impressed" when he reaches 
Chicago. 

If the wayfaring stranger is not apparently 
impressed offhand and at first blush, the priests 
of the Gospel of Bigness have this formula of 
attack. First inform him that Chicago has 
two millions of people, and that fifty years ago 
it was a village of log cabins. This ought to 
fetch him, but if it fail, then refer to the 
Chicago Fire, and to the New Chicago spring- 
ing Phoenix-like from its ashes. If he be still 
stubborn-kneed, bring on the Stock Yards 
with its toll of death, or the tunnel under the 
lake — that wonder of the world twenty-five 
years ago. If he remain obdurate, the new 
thirty million dollar sewer may fetch him. If 
everything else fails, he must succumb to the 
World's Fair. This is Chicago's chef-d'oeuvre. 



AMERICAN NOTES 171 

On this subject look out for the inquisitors, for 
if you have not seen this wonder, you will have 
meted to you supreme pity and contempt. 
You will be made to wish that the Fair had 
been swallowed up before you heard of it. 
However, this would not ease your pain, for 
ever after it would be spoken of as the greatest 
swallo wing-up in history. Dickens would find 
the Great Fire still celebrated with rejoicings, 
and lurid woodcut flames in the newspapers. 
The Fire has really lost all the advantages it 
once had as a public calamity, but its fame for 
Bigness will endure forever. From the Chicago 
point of view, pity and contempt for New York 
rises to the sublime; the island city is a mere 
wart on the face of the earth. 

It is a trait of municipal callow ness to brag. 
London and Paris never yell their brags at one 
another. Their secure position does not need 
to be continually asserted. Let a journalistic 
wag in New York fling a grotesque gibe at 
Chicago and she arises in majesty and pours 
vitriol on her decrepit rival. I quote from 
memory a waggish leader on Chicago that 
appeared in a New York paper : 

As you approach Chicago, she becomes 
foully manifest by a dull, livid cloud that 



172 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

obscures the sky. You burst into this 
mephitic drapery, feeling as though you had 
tumbled into a sewer. * * * It is a common 
thing to see her merchant princes in their 
shirt sleeves sitting on the front porches of 
their palatial homes enjoying an evening 
smoke. * * * The knife-swallowing act 
can still be seen at the hotels. The Gent 
flourishes in Chicago — it is his natural home. 
Few Chicago families have grandparents; 
they cannot afford to. 

The Home Guards in Chicago took this 
waggery seriously. They asserted that Chicago 
was as good as anybody, and that her pedigree, 
sanitation and manners were A. 1. 

These are the reflections of new readings 
of American Notes. If Dickens could come 
again, he would find a nation mellowed and 
ripened with the years. He would find that 
the old order had given way to the new. He 
would find cities provincial and rustic then, 
cosmopolitan now. He would find a national 
life and ambition broad and catholic, not 
narrow and jealous. He would find a nation 
that remembers slavery as a horrible dream is 
remembered in the clear light of mid-noon, a 
nation purified by war, and the long, smoulder- 



AMERICAN NOTES 173 

ing embers of that war, dead and lifeless. He 
would find us able to laugh at the follies and 
vices he mocked. He would find the great 
republic of the west living in happy amity with 
its mother land, the old hatreds and bickerings 
gone forever. 



AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE. 

THE critic who ventures discussion of 
American literature, risks an encounter 
with the Intense American. The jurisdic- 
tion of this national policeman is to see that 
the patriotism of his countrymen suffers no 
diminution or abatement. Of late he has paid 
some attention to the literary part of his 
authority. He insists on running the American 
Flag up in the library, as a lighthing rod to 
protect American authors from any chance 
thunderbolts of criticism. The British critic is 
especially warned to keep off the green growth 
of American letters. Our watchman's oath of 
allegiance to American authors, excludes loyalty 
to all others, and so he becomes an uncomfort- 
able and uncompromising person. I have long 
wanted to criticise Longfellow for the didactic 
character of some of his poems, and the ticketed 
and labeled moral that is so often intruded. A 
good tale is often spoiled by the intrusive moral. 
If it were not rank treason I would like to say 

174 



AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 175 

that Hiawatha as a poem is partly spoiled 
because of its form as a long monotonous chant 
in which the refrain of the unvariant lines is 
early worn out, and thenceforth becomes a 
weariness. We learn from the Intense American 
that some of our authors have Intense Ameri- 
canism; that Bryant was a "thorough 
American," and that a "spirit of True 
Americanism breathes in Longfellow." These 
awe-inspiring terms not being defined, we may 
take them to be simply an exercise in phrase- 
mongering. 

Perhaps after all, this True, this 
Thorough, this Intense Americanism, is only 
a State of Mind, in which Patriotism- uplifts 
itself into a seventh heaven by simply tugging 
at its boot-straps. The vocabulary of uncritical 
adulation in Europe does not seem to have an 
equivalent term. He would be a daring idolator 
indeed who should insist that Dickens, or 
Thackeray, or Reade were gifted with Intense 
Britishism, for they committed many treasons 
by attacking every British institution from the 
House of Lords down to the dinners of snobs. 
It is difficult to discover that Cervantes had 
True Castileanism, or Plato True Greeceianism, 
or Dante True Italianism. Our own Brander 




176 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Mathews has set us some lessons in literary 
patriotism, the humour of which seems uncon- 
scious on his part. Thus does he warn youngest 
readers against the deadly snare of British 
literature : 

It cannot be said too often or too 
emphatically that the British are foreigners, 
and that their ideals in life, in literature, in 
politics, in taste, in art, are not our ideals. 
From this author we also learn that it is: 
In consequence of the wholesome 
Americanism imparted in the school room, 
that American boys and girls have increased 
their demand for American books. 
Foolish Americans have always had the 
same weakness for foreign authors, that they 
have for foreign goods, and this unnatural 
appetite must be checked by authority. The 
sad admission must be made that it is too late 
to put a tariff on British brains — the serpent 
has already crept in. The Dogberry s of our 
literary police will call out in the street, but 
despite their warnings, vagrom Englishmen 
will to some extent still commit breaches of our 
peace in prose and verse. I refuse to thrill over 
the spectacle of the American Youth becoming 
so infected with True Americanism of the 



AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 177 

Brander Mathews kind that he rapidly turns 
to American authors. If there is any one 
primal and unchanging element in the character 
of the American Youth, it is his disregard of 
the authors who write his books. Nor does he 
care very much about the exact locus in quo 
of his fiction. Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss 
Family Robinson, and Tom Brown, mean 
just as much to an American boy as to an 
English boy. Such books have no nationality; 
they are written for the universal boy. For like 
reasons the Eton boy could gloat over Tom 
Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, without 
disloyalty to the Crown. 

So many of us Yankees are Jacobites at 
heart, drinking secretly to the king over the 
water; we find creative genius where we can, 
undeterred by the True American. Our nation 
drones through one generation in deadly peace, 
hearing no sound but that of mill and loom, 
and the pleasant tinkle of little verses. No 
minstrel of our own breaks the silence, but 
from across the seas comes a strain of daring 
music from England's new singer. The 
majestic Recessional has set her heart afire and 
made us wish that heaven would send us such 
a poet. This poem would have an equal 



178 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

appeal for the Pharaohs, for Moses and Aaron, 
for the nations of later times, that grow 
drunken with power. It has the measured 
majesty of the speech of the prophets when 
they foretold the doom of nations. It is a lost 
fragment from Jeremiah or Isaiah. It has a 
Scriptural eloquence, sonorous, uplifting, called 
from the clearer hill-tops to the valleys below. 
It is a battle hymn and also a hymn of peace 
for the time when battles are over. It seems 
to close the century with the sound we have 
been listening for. This singer surely does 
not belong to the puddering rout of birth-day 
ode-makers who periodically sing lullabys to the 
English people. Perhaps he stole his fire from 
strange lands where he wandered, loving every 
spot where there was a man alive. Was there 
some alchemy in the branding Indian sun that 
made his soul great so that he could stand 
stern-browed at England's jubilee and tell her 
in Homeric verse that all her pomp was one 
with Nineveh and Tyre? This psalm is his 
title deed to Westminster. None but he could 
smite the chords with might, as there was but 
one in that heroic test of long ago, who could 
bend the great bow of Ulysses and make the 
string "sound sweetly as the swallow's song." 



AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 179 

The lines of Coleridge seem meant for this 
music: 

And now 'twas like all instruments, 

Now like a lonely flute ; 
And now it is an angel's song- 

That makes the heavens be mute. 

We would like to feel that he owed some 
debt to New England, where he tarried awhile, 
but it is plain that he is English to the core, a 
child of the Thames, and not of the Ganges or 
the Merrimac. A little later when our ambi- 
tion was leaping ocean barriers he sobered us 
by telling how basely or how nobly we might 
bear The White Man's Burden, 

Shall we shut any part of this inspiration 
from our ears because it did not come from the 
banks of the Hudson or the Mississippi? 
Could our army of flag-wavers with their 
artificial devices for manufacturing artificial 
patriotism, so move a great race? Meanwhile 
Brander Mathews and his constabulary will 
continue to pick their flints and fight Bunker 
Hill over again against the British invader. 

The even-blooded American who does not 
care whether an author has the ingredient of 
True Americanism in his inkwell or not, will 
still claim free trade rights with British litera- 



180 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

ture. Perhaps this weakness of Intense 
Americanism is responsible for the belief, 
current in certain quarters that A Man With- 
out a Country, is a great romance. This 
patriotic sermon — this high class Fourth of 
July oration has been given the title of the 
Great American Story. It is really quite inter- 
esting and instructive for fifteen-year-olds. It 
is the history of a youth, who in a moment of 
silly pique, being nagged by his captors, said 
that he wished he might never hear of the 
United States again. This was only the bitter 
froth of his real sin, for he had intrigued with 
Aaron Burr against his country, and that 
fascinating traitor had woven him tight in his 
web. The Powers-That-Be could forgive the 
real treason, and let the head traitor go free, 
but they could not forgive the boy's petulant 
lack of lip service. So they sent him on the high 
seas, where he wandered for many weary years a 
remorseful derelict, and by great command he 
was never to hear his country spoken of. They 
adopted towards him an Americanized version 
of the punishment of the Wandering Jew and 
of Tantalus, until old age came and death 
relieved him of his pain. This a pretty story 
with a moral as obvious as a mountain. Later 



AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 181 

editions of it are spoiled somewhat by the 
egotism of authorship, which impels Mr. Hale 
to explain that it is a myth, and his reasons 
for writing it and all about the lesson that it 
teaches. But the moral somewhat loses its 
flavour with the callowest youth, when he sees 
around him many patriots who wave the Old 
Flag with one hand while they reach for a fat 
appropriation or a swindling government 
contract with the other. Aaron Burr at least 
did not buy legislatures and boards of aldermen. 

The moral seems to be superficially, that 
to be immune, you need only shape your 
schemes for the destruction of the institutions 
of your country to the prevailing fashion. You 
can then found an orphan asylum or a great 
university, and the hats will fly off as you go by. 

All this may be thought a by-path from 
books, but human life is stretched along the by- 
ways as well as along the main traveled roads. 
This preface brings to mind some Americans 
who have not made a strutting parade of their 
patriotism. In example of this we have such 
Americans as Lowell, whose patriotism and 
love of country had no dross upon it ; whose 
scholarship was as broad and generous as the 
seas that wash our shores; who never penned 



182 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

provincial and rustic cant about True 
Americanism ; who loved books as a man and 
not as an American, and who could love a book 
neither more nor less because of the nationality 
of the author ; who held close fellowship with 
the great of every land without a thought that 
it made him any the less an American. With 
him the world of letters had no narrowing 
partition lines that could separate Shakespeare, 
Cervantes and Moliere from Hawthorne and 
Poe and Emerson and make one less than the 
other. The dead who sleep at Westminster 
were his blood brothers. With him we can 
safely place Irving, Hawthorne, Poe and 
Holmes. The fame of these rests on their 
genius and not on the accident of nationality. 
The many influences that may have somewhat 
dwarfed American scholarship, have not 
modified Lowell's genius. He would have 
honoured any land. As a poet and essayist 
he had a ripened wit and learning that places 
him as the first of American scholars. He had 
a broader and more varied scholarship than 
either Holmes or Emerson. He entered into 
the death grapple with slavery with a stern 
and knightly courage and ardour that never 
swerved or turned aside. His words were 



AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 183 

"battles for freedom, " when freedom most 
needed defenders. He was the peer of England's 
greatest scholars, and his fame will brighten 
with the years. 

New soils do not always fatten genius. In 
a new land the activities of the people are 
expended in subduing the wilderness, in 
building great cities, and in developing material 
resources. With this justification it should be 
no blemish on our patriotism that we esteem 
Tennyson as greater than Longfellow, and 
Scott than Cooper. It should not shame us 
that we find a richer, deeper tone in Caledonia 
and Bannockburn, and that they crowd so 
closely in our affections the songs of our own 
lands. We have much didactic verse and dainty 
verse and here and there an anthem full of 
power, but few of our poets have put such 
inspirations into verse as Scott, and Tennyson, 
Burns, and Kipling. It may be that Columbia 
lingers too long in the market place listening to 
the music of the ticker and the song of the 
stockjobber, forgetting the dreams and inspira- 
tions that can alone make her children great. 

Is it not a question whether our battle 
hymn has yet been written? Yankee Doodle 
is a silly jingle; The Star Spangled Banner 



184 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

is of limited compass, Marching Through 

Georgia, and some other war songs are a mere 

matter of music without fit words, and besides 

they cannot be as well sung in Georgia as in 

Wisconsin. Few of our patriotic songs will be 

long remembered although they are dressed in 

stirring music for the mob. They have but a 

spark of that immortal fire that blazes in 

Kipling's latest verse, or in Tennyson's epic, 

the battle of the one against the fifty-three. 

Our Spanish War has no poet, although it has 

inflicted upon us any amount of doggerel and 

raphsodical music. There was no residium of 

verse after our war of 1812, and the Mexican 

war was not provocative of poetry. Perhaps 

the American Muse was ashamed of that 

conquest and remained silent even over the 

glories of Chapultepec and Monterey. I had 

almost forgotten a song however, with some 

fine lines in it written by one Hoffman : 

We were not many, we who pressed 

Beside the brave w T ho fell that day ; 

But who of us has not confessed 

He'd rather share their warrior rest 

Then not have been at Monterey. 

This seems to be the solitary poet of the 

Mexican War. Who hath remembrance of him 



AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 185 

now? In our first struggle for freedom, no 
Koernor turned the soldier's barracks into 
temples where liberty was deified in song. The 
battle against slavery called out some stormy 
verse, yet how little we now remember of the 
scathing passion, the tender, burning words, 
that Whittier and Longfellow breathed over 
the wrongs of our bondmen. Some of our 
jewels it is true are covered with later rubbish. 
Like a dimly remembered song heard in remote 
childhood is that eloquent fragment of 
Emerson's commencing: 

By the rude bridge that arched the flood. 

Joaquin Miller's Song of Peace is not half 
so well known as the Recessional. We seem 
to miss the nearer music and remember best 
the rival lines of Scott and Burns and Kipling. 

Upon what meat do these islanders feed 
that they have such power to charm us with 
their songs, and make us forget old wrongs, 
old feuds and old battles? It may be their 
ocean empire with its outposts on every main. 
The declamations of our schoolboys bind the 
race together and annul the bitterness sown by 
politicians. When we turn from the American 
poet to his English likeness we are apt to find 
an enlarged edition. 



186 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Whittier's poetry is a crystal winding 
brook, reflecting summer days and moonlit 
nights, and the leaf and flower of forest and 
meadow. But Tennyson's verse is a river 
running in stormier measure, and mirroring a 
larger life. Nature has dealt kindly with us ; 
she has given us sunnier days and mightier 
lakes and rivers, but in partial mood she has 
added an Attic savour to the wind that blows 
across the island kingdom that our more arid 
breezes have not. The Mississippi Valley lacks 
several things to make it a place of poetic 
inspiration. Its mountain fringes lie a thousand 
miles apart with a flat between. It has no 
ruins, no traditions, no history except the new 
and yeasty product begun since our possession 
of it. Very early, no doubt the human family 
sent out some meager outposts to this continent. 
A thousand generations have since flitted 
through its forests, yet they have died like the 
cave bear and made no sign. Their literary 
remains consist in a few attenuated traditions. 
Even Cooper's book, or artificial Indian could 
furnish no theme for the poet. Longfellow 
tried to fuse this stubborn personality of the 
Red Brother into song, with something of a 
success considering the material, but the form 



AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 187 

of his verse is a long, oft-repeated chant, with 
the monotonous rhythm of the prayer-drums at 
a Chippewa corn dance. At such a festival, 
the prayer-drums booming through the wilder- 
ness, typify the Indian character. It is an 
unchanging, ceaseless roll that carries with it 
the somber unchanging history of the race. It 
has no vital, living music in it. It belongs to 
and is a part of the unchanging forests and 
prairies, and the endless flow of lonely streams 
where nature broods alone over her own and 
all things remain as in the first day. Centuries 
of silence and shadow have passed over this 
race, and yet its history can be read in a few 
scattered arrow heads. Such a people could 
not fatten a soil with legend and story. 

I fancy Scott and Burns would have sung 
no songs had they been born on Bark River 
Flats, their only indigenous inspirations an 
occasional flint spear point, or an ancient Indian 
trail blazed through the forest. They owed all 
to the mountains of Scotland, her heathery 
hills and moors, her tarns and brooks peopled 
with the legends of men outworn. For them a 
thousand rude singers from the cave-man down 
had been building a rich alluvium of romance 
and story. In such a soil poets grow spontan- 



188 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

eously and involuntarily. Poetry is an exotic 
in a flat country and not of natural growth. 
Mountains have always been a great boon to 
letters; the gods dwelt on a mountain, and 
the muses on a high hill. The level plains and 
flat surfaces of earth have always been the 
abode of cattle herders and uninspired men. 
Burns was not a sudden creation ; his poetry 
was in the nature of inherited wealth. He was 
the heir of many singers, and all the currents 
of Scottish poetry from the earliest times 
converged in him. Whittier says : 

I saw the same blithe day return, 
The same sweet fall of even, 

That rose on Wooded Cragie-burn, 
And sank on Crystal Devon. 

I matched with Scotland's heather}^ hills 

The sweetbriar and the clover, 
With Ayr and Doon my native rills 

Their wood-hymns chanting over. 

Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time. 

So Bonny Doon but tarry, 
Blot out the epic's stately rhyme, 

But spare his Highland Mary. 
Whittier wrote some of the sweetest minor 



AMERICANISM IN LITERATURE 189 

poetry in our language, but he could not 
transplant to the banks of the Susquehanna, 
or the Connecticut, the ruined castle of Scotland 
with its thousand-year-old volume of human 
life, or the myriad legends that throng the 
banks of the Doon and the Ayr. His song to 
Burns is a tribute to the richer life, to the 
deeper power and passion of Scotland's poet. 
It is the generous tribute of a poet who stands 
in a new land barren of tradition, to the land 
hoary with age and recorded legend. 

In our first half-century we had great 
soldiers and orators and statesmen, but the 
crop of letters was scanty. There must have 
been many unsung Odysseys in the lives of 
those hardy adventurers who came with Raleigh 
and Smith, and whose descendants later drifted 
down the Ohio and the Mississippi and over 
the plains, driving the Indian and the buffalo 
before them. But we had no Homers to put 
this pioneer wonder -land into verse. Life was 
too stern and exacting and pitched in too 
intense a key, so we built literature slowly in 
our pioneer age. This early poverty had its 
effect on the really great builders like Longfellow 
and Cooper, who came later. 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 

IT is now more than sixty years since the 
death of John Marshall, yet each 

recurring year brings for his character some 
new praise. The danger that confronts the 
eulogist of this eminent American is that of 
falling into the weak commonplace of conven- 
tional biography. It is not with such trite 
praise that we best remember him. We appoint 
this day for his remembrance; we turn again 
to his life and work, to the written page where 
his toil and genius stand recorded ; we adjure 
the younger men of our generation to consider 
his character anew, and to take guidance from 
him as the greatest and worthiest example 
which our profession has given them. So we 
frame his eulogy more earnestly than by ordered 
and studied speech. 

The lives of many of those who have made 
a considerable figure in history need at least a 
century of perspective, for no nearer judgment 
avails to properly place them. Such is the 

193 



194 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

force of habit and suggestion that the claims 
of restless Mediocrity, espoused by the foolish 
and thoughtless, fret and hamper us long after 
our better judgment has pronounced its 
condemnation. Dr. Johnson once said: "It 
is wonderful, sir, with how little real superiority 
of mind men can make an eminent figure in 
public." Many modern instances prove the 
truth of this observation. Often the quack and 
the mountebank are unmasked only after death 
has been long in the enjoyment of its mortal 
reversion. Some fames suffer so much diminu- 
tion in Time's winnowing that we are taught 
not to trust the biographers overmuch. We 
finally come to know many of them for what 
they are, — masters of fiction, high priests of 
humbug, cant, and palaver, their gospel that 
of the little, their creed that of triviality. They 
form the donkey chorus in the drama of history; 
they weave haloes for smug Mediocrity, and 
pretentious Dullness owes them all its bays. 
They are the valets of deified shams, dressing 
them in the lion's hide; they are mere tailors 
of historical figures with a plentiful supply of 
padding. They artistically conceal this blemish 
and that deformity; they accentuate every 
trifling advantage, and virtues and traits which 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 195 

are but commonplace they adorn so that they 
shall appear grand and stately. They are 
courtiers, bowing low before kings of shreds 
and patches. They first ostentatiously ask, 
"what is truth?" And then make no search 
for an answer, but hunt up and mass together 
as many tawdry falsehoods as will serve their 
turn, and call their work, — Biography. So it 
happens that the accidents of birth who become 
kings and the accidents of politics who many 
times become presidents or otherwise achieve 
great place are largely tailor-made. 

The courtiers of the bed-chamber who 
were graciously permitted to look on while the 
king of France awoke from his morning slumbers 
and made his toilet, were so overawed by the 
divine condescension that they saw nothing 
vulgar or grotesque in the ceremony; the king 
in his night-gear was as awful and majestic 
to them as the king in ermine. For in the 
biographical circles of kings and rulers, the 
sense of humour stands in arrested development. 
Our biographers who write ''Lives,' of 
presidents and of temporary notables are 
unconscious purveyors of exquisite satire. They 
spare neither age nor youth in their idol- making 
task. The real boy, fated to be president or 



196 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

to command listening senates probably stole 
melons, played truant, fought with his mates, 
and passed through the silly season of 
hobbledehoyhood as other boys. But the 
biographer takes this boy in hand and he 
emerges a different being. In his bright and 
ornate lexicon the melon episode is surrounded 
by all the glamour which fiction attaches to 
the slightly irregular performances of Robin 
Hood ; the boy-battles grow from mere heated 
discussion over a strenuous game of marbles, to 
avengements of wrong and injustice worthy of 
Sir Galahad. If this boy, in training for fame, 
is called on to perform the plain duty of telling 
who stole the jam, any finesse in statement on 
his part, gives clear promise of the future 
Talleyrand, or the eminent lawyer. The tallow 
dip by which he breathlessly devours yellow- 
backed fiction becomes a sacred flame in the 
light of which he hangs enamoured over Horace 
and Homer. When the tailors are through 
with this book, or artificial boy, his own mother 
would not know him. Consider him also in 
biography, grown to manhood, and his kindred 
and all his belongings. The faithful kodac of 
the biographer is turned upon his ox and his 
ass, his horse and his dog, his children, his 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 197 

wife and his remote ancestors. The latter are 
dragged from their forgotten graves and made 
to give prophecy of the greatness of their 
illustrious descendant. His children and grand- 
children are ennobled, and compared with them, 
Little Lord Fauntleroy would be a mere street 
gamin. Innumerable helpless infants, and even 
horses and dogs are cursed and weighted with 
his name. The courtiers of the bed-chamber 
chronicle him going and coming, rising up and 
lying down, eating and drinking, and thinking 
— even when of this last there is no visible 
evidence. His wife is always the queenliest of 
her sex and has poems dedicated to her in 
her own right. If she warm his slippers or 
administer to his wants in sickness, Genial 
Jenkins a-tiptoe at the door, writes himself 
awe-striken at this instance of wifely devotion. 
Worst of all, the easy commonplaces of the 
Exalted One become pearls of great price, and 
are published as Gems of Thought. Such is 
biography as it is written. Macauley's New 
Zealander who is to sit on London Bridge and 
gaze on the ruins of St. Paul's, will, if he fare far 
enough, inspect the ruins of our ex-presidents 
and ex-statesmen, and give to a distant age the 
benefit of much valuable rumination. 



198 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

While biographers thus elevate men of little 
consequence, they often do what they can to 
spoil the fame of really great men, by servile 
adulation and a surfeit of superlatives. Every 
hero is bound to have a Boswell to make him 
appear both excessively wise and excessively 
foolish. Thus it is that we owe much to 
biography for the prescriptive rights which 
certain ancient lies acquire to pass for truth. 
But the art of biography has never been able 
to spoil the fame of John Marshall, and the 
multitude of biographers have never cheapened 
or vulgarized any act of his. Whether in 
school-boy garb poring over Milton and 
Shakespeare, or as a soldier of the infant 
colonies at Brandywine, or in the blood-stained 
snows of Valley Forge, or serving their councils 
when peace came, or as the master-mind of our 
great tribunal for many years, he was every 
inch a man. 

It is not given to any other profession in 
this country to have one universally accorded, 
pre-eminent name. We could not agree on the 
greatest soldier, poet, philosopher, novelist, or the 
greatest statesman or preacher; but I think we 
would all name Marshall as our greatest jurist. 

One of the qualities of hero-worship is its 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 199 

demand for a constant succession of heroes. At 
fifteen we devour Plutarch' s Lives, and the 
deeds of his worthies will not let us sleep. We 
kindle over the showier pageants of history, over 
Patrick Henry and Clay, and all those notables 
who have figured in some dramatic climax. 
Grown older, we demand that our idols be of 
greater proof. We find, as Emerson says, that 
"history is made up of the biographies of a few 
stout souls. " Mingled with these, we see many 
pretenders at the work of history-making, yet it 
sometimes takes us half a life-time to separate 
what is true and stable from that which is 
pretentious and false. But it is a fine quality in 
the character of Marshall that whether we 
come to him early or late, he always has for us 
the same unchanging manhood and serenity, 
the same moral elevation. 

Bacon took bribes. Our admiration for 
Lord Eldon flags when we find that he set his 
face against every reform proposed for mis- 
governed England, that he had no principles, 
that he urged religious persecution, was 
ignorant of literature and of systems of juris- 
prudence, and was a toadying place-hunter. If 
we turn to Lord Mansfield, we finally come to 
know that he was cold and unfeeling, and 



200 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

lacked moral courage and that his love of justice 
was not ingrained, but a matter of professional 
training of a like quality with the love of some 
men for philanthropy; they love business so 
well that they make their good works a matter 
of business and not of innate benevolence. If 
we attempt hero-worship with Lord Thurlow, 
our ardour is checked by the knowledge that 
he thought the patriot Home Tooke should be 
pilloried rather than imprisoned, because he 
was of sedentary habits, and imprisonment 
would be no punishment to him; by his puerile 
plan for subjugating the colonies by a writ of 
scire facias and by his opposition to all inter- 
ference with the slave trade. Even grand old 
Coke was brutal and unfair towards the helpless 
victims of oppressive laws whom he prosecuted 
for the crown. As for Blackstone, a careful 
study of his life does not entirely impress us 
with his scholarship as a lawyer or his breadth 
as a man. Nor can Lord Hardwicke's fame 
claim our homage when we have read of him 
that; — "He was undoubtedly an excellent 
Chancellor, and might have been thought a 
great man, had he been less avaricious, less 
proud; less unlike a gentleman. " 

Coming nearer to our own time, if we 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 201 

thrill over the eloquence of Pinkney we shudder 
when we find him wearing kid gloves in court. 
Contemporaneous verdict wrote Ichabod ox\ the 
front of the god-like Webster because he did 
not bravely meet the storm that was gathering 
over the question of slavery. 

So we ruefully survey the broken idols of 
boyish years, thankful if some salvage of 
character be left out of these many wrecks. 
But Marshall is not one of these; we still 
stand before him reverently and uncovered, our 
faith unshaken, our admiration and respect 
unchanged. As a practitioner at the bar, he 
was patient and considerate with the court, and 
did not, so far as can be learned, ever make the 
near-by tavern a court of dernier ressort, in 
which to prosecute a blasphemous appeal from 
an adverse judgment. Nor was he bumptious 
and arrogant with the court, seeking to gain 
by rudeness and noise what he could not win 
with argument. Nor did he wring unjust 
decisions from a weak and halting judge by 
overawing him with his reputation or superior 
learning, or by quoting to him the street 
opinion of Mr. So-and-so, an eminent lawyer, 
(whom he knew the judge looked on as 
infallible), to the effect that the opposite party 



202 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

had no case. While he had a natural wit 
sufficient for all purposes, he did not wear it 
out by continual exercise in court so that it 
became as laggard as a founderous horse, (as 
was the wont of many lawyers in his day, and 
since.) Nor did he encourage attempt at wit 
in court on the part of lawyers without wit, 
who driveled in pointless wooden jests under 
the impression that they were funny. Nor did 
he laugh servilely and hilariously at the 
attempted wit of the judge, or flatter or cajole 
him, but treated him in all respects as if he 
were a mere human being. Nor did he try to 
entrap the judge at nisi prius into committing 
an error against him which should work a 
reversal of the cause on appeal. Nor did he 
soar on eagle wings in argument just for the 
sake of soaring, or tear a passion to tatters, to 
very rags, in order to split the ears of the 
groundlings. He never laid himself open to the 
rebuke which Baron Alderson once administered 
to a young lawyer who was soaring into the 
empyrean, — "Don't go any higher, for you are 
already out of the jurisdiction of the court. " 
With Marshall the best eloquence was the 
eloquence of simplicity, of naturalness, of ear- 
nestness and love of truth, unspoiled by self- 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 203 

consciousness or vanity. He listened patiently 
to the most foolish and verbose client, knowing 
that now and then, comes a man into a lawyer's 
office who must first give the history of his own 
and his wife's relations, and of a previous suit 
he has had, and of a highway robbery and a 
murder case that once occurred in his neighbour- 
hood, before he talks of the case he came to 
consult about. Beloved old Fuller thus 
describes these banal clients : — "Many country 
people must be impertinent, before they can be 
pertinent, and cannot give evidence about a 
hen, but they must first begin it'in the egg." 
There was a like freedom from error in 
Marshall's conduct when he came to the 
bench. As a judge he was patient and ready 
to listen to the most tedious barrister, knowing 
that now and then even the most tedious will 
let drop a few words of sense and pertinence. 
I cannot find however, that he had the saving 
sense of humour of Chief Justice Gibson, who 
once playfully boasted that he had achieved the 
height of his ambition, namely, — "To be able 
to keep my eyes fixed on a dull speaker while 
my thoughts are employed with more agreeable 
objects, — this is certainly a great judicial 
triumph. " Some of my experiences in arguing 



204 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

cases, have led me to believe that other judges 
than Gibson have acquired this happy facility. 
Marshall had the first qualification of a good 
judge, that of being a good listener. He heard 
the last word of the wordiest barrister, knowing 
that it might contain the whole matter. He 
interrupted counsel sometimes with pertinent 
suggestion and interrogation, but never for the 
purpose of airing his own learning, and only 
that he might the better elucidate the subject 
in hand. He never delighted in small shows of 
authority over the members of his bar, and it 
is certain that when he presided at nisi prius, 
he did not aim to impress the galleries, or use 
the occasion of an application for a continuance 
to harangue the rear benches. Nor did he 
play politics in court intending that the benefit 
should return to him in the shape of political 
advancement or favour. His character was such 
as to assure us that no matter what judicial 
position he might occupy, he would never curry 
favour with the people by disloyalty to the bar. 
The striking feature of his court, was the 
absence of hurry. The court seemed to have 
plenty of time, and calmly and leisurely took 
up the cases before it and heard them exhaust- 
ively presented before passing on them. The 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 205 

modern practice of writing opinions while you 
wait, was happily not in vogue then. MARSHALL 
was not haunted by the fear of an overclogged 
calendar, and thought it more important that 
causes should be properly considered and 
determined than that he should keep- his 
calendar clear. In commendation of his 
practice, it is not too much to say that half the 
errors that creep into the decisions of our courts 
now, are caused by lack of time to properly 
argue and present cases, and then by lack of 
time on the part of the courts to consider the 
cases and write out their opinions. We 
feverishly and hurriedly argue cases, watching 
the while the threatening clock, and the judges 
listen feverishly and hurriedly also watching the 
clock, and, still watching the clock, feverishly 
and hurriedly write out their opinions. The 
tyranny of the clock should be banished from 
our courts. The blind goddess has always 
been depicted as holding the scales and the 
sword, but never the hour-glass. It should be 
enough of a disability that she is blind without 
making her travesty Father Time, by stealing 
for her a part of his equipment. To paraphrase 
the poet's sentiment, we should, in court, live 
in thought, and in ripened judgment; not in 



206 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

the shadow of the fingers on a dial. The 
understanding of a complicated case only grows 
to matured perfection through that growth 
and evolution which is the law governing all 
human endeavour. The fruits of haste in court 
are unripe judgments, commanding no respect 
and satisfying no obligation. Nor is undue 
haste solely a vice of our courts of last resort. 
We have all seen trial judges in trials involving 
the liberty or other important rights of the 
citizen, unduly limit jury argument, leaving 
counsel to stumble hurriedly on, with the 
harrassing thought that the judicial gavel 
w 7 ould at last fall inopportunely on his hopes. 
As lawyers we should meet these encroachments 
on our rights and duties with that rugged 
independence that is ours as equal ministers 
and officers of justice with the judge upon the 
bench. It is good to turn from this picture of 
haste to the serene atmosphere of Marshall's 
court, where, as you may know, no haste or 
carelessness would be tolerated. 

The bar did much for Marshall. Before 
him came the great lawyers of his day. There 
came Martin and Harper, Ingersoll and Dexter, 
and the lawyer-poet Key; there came from the 
west the great Kentuckian, Henry Clay, and 



\ 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 207 

with him Marshall the younger; there also was 
the exiled Emmet, who fled from his native 
land after his brother gave up his life to English 
justice; to that court also came Rawle and 
Dallas, Binney and Sergeant, the eloquent 
Pinkney, Stockton, Wirt and Adams. Early 
in the century Webster appeared there, rugged 
and somber as his own New England mountains, 
a figure of heroic port, fit to hold a world in awe. 
Some of these lawyers of Marshall's court, 
like Swann, and the Lees, who argued scores 
of causes before him, had not fame enough to 
accord them a place in the enclopsedias, — those 
dusty crypts of the immortals. So often it is 
that the fame of the great lawyer is written in 
the running water; you may search and you 
shall find but his name, or a handful of dust, 
in I know not what forgotten graveyard. It 
was an age of saddle-bags and circuit-riding, — 
the golden age of the American Bar. Not 
golden in fat fees for the lawyer, but golden in 
its wealth of high ambitions and aspirations, in 
its leisure for study and reflection. The lawyer 
was not ruffled or discomposed by the roar and 
clang of a hurrying civilization. Calmly he 
could welcome the pale midnight lamp and the 
day of toil succeeding. The great lawyers who 



208 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

came to Marshall's court had the primal 
vigour of a new race. A new heaven and a new 
earth were in creation, and the morning song 
of that creation made vibrant music in the heart 
of man. The mighty youth of our nation, 
awkward, yet strong and virile, was breaking 
from its swaddling clothes. Life was full, and 
warm and glorious, untrammeled by king or 
caste, or adamantine social formations. Bunker 
Hill and Yorktown were near at hand and the 
tumult of the seven years' battle yet thrilled 
the air. By farm, and forge, and shop, in the 
pulpit, at the bar, and on the bench, were 
found the patriots who had faced the veterans 
of the king in the great struggle for indepen- 
dence, and when evening came they told by 
their firesides, again and again, the tale of 
valour and devotion. Mother earth never before 
cradled so heroic a race. For what it had been 
and was to be, it was worthy the prophetic 
benediction bestowed upon the Patriarch, 
Abraham — "Look now towards heaven and 
tell the stars, if thou be able to number them. 
So shall thy posterity be. ' ' 

It was already turning towards the bound- 
less west, where unknown rivers ran, and 
unknown mountains and plains, mocked and 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 209 

beckoned it with visions of greater emprise. 
The century was yet young when we added 
Louisiana to our heritage, and beyond that, in 
the gorgeous cloudland of the setting sun, lay 
the empire of the Golden Gate. We ask now 
in wonder, what pulsing sap of high endeavour 
was it that sent the hardy pioneers of our race 
over the mountain barriers, and down the 
westward-flowing rivers, into the dark and 
bloody ground, while yet half the seacoast was a 
wilderness, and millions of acres there, were 
untouched by axe or plough. "They were 
blooded to the open and the sky; " they heard 
the voices of the mysterious myriad-tongued 
wilderness of the west, calling to them to come 
farther and still farther. Through all the 
western wild, they founded new republics. 
To-day you might look upon a land wrapped 
in the changeless sleep of unnumbered centuries; 
to-morrow came, and the forest rang with the 
sounds of the pioneer combat with nature. 
Upon the pioneer hearthstone they kindled the 
beacon fires, to guide the thronging tide that 
followed after. They carried with them as their 
ark of the covenant, the sacred inheritance of 
liberty and law. Under all the ranging stars, 
this was the true romance, the unsung and 



210 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

unwritten epic, greater than that of any warrior 
host of olden time. It vivified even the dullest 
township records. Nature molded and bounded 
and placed them. They took their lands, not 
in formal squares, to delight a surveyor's 
science, but from tree to hilltop, from river to 
mountain, from buffalo trail to Indian trail. 
Sometimes their title records were written in 
blood, and a devolution of ownership from 
father to son is told with the simple inscription, 
— "Killed by the Indians." Their abstracts 
of title are not the dry and tedious records that 
we are wont to peruse as daily tasks; the dull 
parchment glows with the light of the blazing 
roof-tree, and stains darker than ink, tell of 
the awful woodland tragedy. The lawyer of 
those infant communities carried his rifle in one 
hand and his Coke and Blackstone in the 
other. It was the battle of the strong, and 
this near-by boundary line of peril and adven- 
ture made men great. It gave Boone and his 
fellow frontiersmen to the world of romance and 
story; it gave Marshall, and his compeers to 
the bench and the bar. From the loins of the 
young republic so invigorated, sprang the great 
lawyers who counselled with Marshall, and 
aided him through many years of toil to build 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 211 

that monument of learning that is our delight 
and admiration. I think the influence of such 
an age produced in the pioneer lawyer the 
happiest blending of the man of action and of 
affairs, sternly contending with the problems of 
infant statehood, and the scholar, unhampered 
by closet wisdom, or any of the decayed 
scholastic regimen of older lands. The fable 
of the ancient athletes, who, thrown to earth, 
leaped up invigorated by the momentary contact 
with the great mother, had in it something 
more than fable. Men newly sprung from the 
soil have nurtured in them best the eternal 
harmonies of nature, and their rugged strength 
brushes away the conventions and customs of 
outworn men. It was this that gave the 
Corsican adventurer power to make a new 
science of war, and to shake the thrones of 
Europe, while enfeebled kings and nobles stood 
panic-stricken in trembling imbecility. 

In the youth of our nation, its people were 
given no child-age. They had the simplicity of 
shepherd and peasant, yet theirs was no shep- 
herd peace; no bucolic calm where village sports 
and minstrel songs beguilded the time, and all 
the currents of life ran kindly and undisturbed. 
The old men dreamed dreams and the young 



212 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

men saw visions, but dream and vision alike 
were of the Titan tasks before them. All the 
poetry and romance that heaven ever gave to 
the imagination of man, environed them in land 
and sea and sky, yet they but meagerly recorded 
these in letters. Their poets were dumb: their 
sages did not sit by the winter's fire and tell 
old tales, but bore the burdens of youth. 
England and France harried our commerce on 
the seas, more than willing in their fierce hatred 
for each other to involve the safety of the little 
republic. On the other side the savage 
threatened, and every pioneer outpost became 
an armed camp, where even the women stood 
ready to drop the distaff and take up the rifle. 
Domestic discord prevailed and a seething 
ferment of conflicting claims seemed ready to 
destroy all that had been gained by the 
Revolution. In this tense, overcharged atmos- 
phere men became statesmen and warriors, 
stern -faced and serious. 

The lawyer of those days did not have 
many books. Some one has said that we 
should read books in order to learn to do with- 
out them, as if in disdain of the mere slave of 
books, who has no sufficient wisdom outside of 
them, and whose learning degenerates into mere 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 213 

pedantry, clinging weakly to line and page for 
its faith. A companion apothegm is, — "Fear 
the man of one book. " The Sage of Malmsbury 
said, "If I had read as many books as other 
persons I should probably know as little. " The 
pioneer lawyer with his well-thumbed Blackstone 
and Coke had to learn to do without books. 
He was a real Robinson Crusoe, cast into a 
bookless land, and commanded by dire necessity 
to build and construct with native skill and wit 
alone. Perhaps it was better so. It may be 
doubted whether Webster would have exceeded 
his argument in the Dartmouth College Case, 
or in Luther vs. Borden, if he had had at his 
command all the wealth of our libraries. We 
are hag-ridden by the multitude of precedents. 
They haunt our higher courts along with the 
dread specter of The Unfinished Calendar. But 
the curse of many books falls heaviest on the 
bar. We have abundant proof that there are 
law book factories running overtime, where text 
books of the gold brick order are manufactured 
in vast quantities. The wooden machinery of 
manufacture is a corps of indigent young men, 
who can each readily toss off a few text books 
every year for a modest stipend. A mental vision 
of the interior of one of these factories discloses 



214 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

long rows of young men at quarter-sawed desks, 
with clerkly pens stuck artistically behind their 
learned ears, turning out piece-work, their 
hours of labour rigidly fixed by the factory 
whistle. Each has his certificate of admission 
to the bar hung handily before him, to which 
he can refer for information from time to time. 
Anon, the manager appears and gives 
commands, — "Mr. Jones, I am astonished that 
you have not completed that work on Constitu- 
tional Law. You have been at it for at least 
two months. I shall have to lay you off for 
thirty days; Mr. Tompkins will take your 
place. " "Mr. Smith, the Employers National 
Defence Association, has given us an order for 
the manufacture of their work on Contributory 
Negligence, and you may commence it at once. 
They sent me a list of cases which they did not 
want cited in it and you must see that none of 
them get in by any mistake. We must fill this 
order in thirty days. When it is finished, I 
have plans and specifications all ready for two 
lines of works that you will begin on, one to be 
called "The Vest Pocket Series, Or Law In 
Little;" the other "Baby Text Books. " So 
the great man passes on scattering law right 
and left. His knights of the road perpetrate 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 215 

their genial hold-ups in our offices, and fill our 
shelves with very much abridged and expurgated 
sheep covered obscurities. If, having a case 
outside the beaten rut o"f authority, you should 
be subjected to the inevitable inane demand of 
the bench for a precedent, do not make search 
in these callow commentaries, for it will be 
fruitless, and will only inspire you with a lethal 
hatred of your fellow men. The enterprise of 
our law book factory makes a fine accord with 
that of some of our jurists, — text books while 
you wait, and opinions while you wait. 

But we willingly turn from these vexing 
humours of the law to our earnest theme. In 
biographical study we search far and near for 
events that may have affected the subject of 
our study. We eagerly interrogate excelling 
nature for the secret of her treasure house that 
has nurtured genius. We grope for the 
inspirations of a great manhood not only in the 
environment of youth, but also in the deeds of 
ancient days — Marathon is still the nursing 
mother of heroes, and every battle for freedom 
breeds patriots even in distant times. The roar 
of the patriot cannon at Bunker Hill summoned 
a race of warrior statesmen from every walk of 
life. No conscription or mercenary hiring 



216 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

compelled their devotion. In Freedom's line of 
descent, they were the lineal heirs of Hampden 
and Sydney. They did not stand in awe of 
kings for their near ancestors had seen one 
English king brought to the block, and another 
driven forth from his kingdom an unthroned 
exile, because of their oppressions. They felt 
the potent spell of that earlier defiance of kingly 
aggression that sprang up in the meadow of 
Runnymede, and of the later confirmation of 
what was there pledged. 

Marshall was born into the world, and 
grew up to manhood at a time when great 
events were moving the nations. In 1755 
England was ringed round with foes, yet on 
the eve of her greatest achievements. She had 
become slothful and lethargic through a long 
period of parliamentary corruption, during 
which the market price of a borough was five 
thousand pounds and Walpole held in his 
pocket the votes of the country members. 
Rotten boroughs and sinecures were the pawns 
of politics, and great noblemen and fawning 
place-hunters played for them with cogged dice. 
The Gentlemen of the Long Robe were 
pleasantly employed in hanging their fellow 
men for stealing rabbits and loaves of bread, 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 217 

and in hunting down those malignants who 
committed treason by objecting to the existing 
order of things. The Man With the Hoe 
patiently tilled his field, and waited and prayed 
under skies of brass. It was in 1757, two years 
after MARSHALL was born, that the elder Pitt 
assumed leadership of the island kingdom. In 
a short space of time under his indomitable 
genius, the English people had changed the 
map of the world. He supplied Frederick The 
Great with English troops, and a vast annual 
subsidy for his defence. In 1759 English 
admirals defeated two French fleets in the Bay 
of Biscay and off the coast of Portugal. Clive 
was winning imperishable renown in India 
against the French, and shortly the Phillipine 
Islands fell into the hands of England. In 
those glorious days Englishmen awoke in the 
morning and asked exultantly "What new 
victory to-day. " 

The lion's whelp was also ranging wide in 
the new w 7 orld. With the aid of colonial troops 
Amherst captured Ticonderoga, and Johnson 
Niagara, while Wolf stormed the Heights of 
Abraham and captured Quebec, and with it 
half a continent. It was in 1762 that an 
English and colonial force captured Havana 



218 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

and with it the Island of Cuba. Almost in a 
day England found herself mistress of one great 
empire on the Ganges and another on the St. 
Lawrence. By means of her invincible navies, 
and the tireless grip that she maintained on the 
mighty fortress that stands in sentineled 
majesty at the gateway of two continents, she 
held supremacy on the seas against all foes. At 
Havana, Quebec, and Ticonderoga, and in 
many bloody battles with the red men, her 
children in the New World held her honour and 
prowess safe. They earned with their blood a 
better requital than she was to give them. The 
time was soon to come when she was to 
ruthlessly sacrifice their dearest rights at the 
behest of a weak and foolish ministry. Even 
in the hour of her greatest triumphs, the storm 
was gathering that was to sweep away her 
power in the land that Raleigh, and Penn, and 
Smith, had won for her from out the unknown 
void. Cavalier and Roundhead, Quaker and 
Puritan, had learned too well the lessons of 
liberty that outlive the dungeon and the 
scaffold, to submit to all the tasks of tyranny. 
The eloquence of Burke and Chatham could 
not shame or deter her from her course. 

The youth of Marshall was spent in this 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 219 

wonder-age, this surging ferment of great 
forces, presaging greater things to come. His 
father, Thomas Marshall, is said to have been 
"A man of extraordinary vigour of mind and 
dauntless courage. " He was the friend of 
Washington, and was one of the first to take 
up arms against the king. He was with 
Washington at the crossing of the Delaware, 
and shared in the honour of that daring exploit. 
Father and son both, were at Brandy wine, and 
the son was also in the battles of Germantown 
and Monmouth, and was with Washington's 
army through that deadly winter in the snow- 
bound camp at Valley Forge. It is our special 
pride that in all of the recurring tragedies of war 
through which we have passed, the soldier- 
lawyer has borne well his part. He has won 
the knighthood of honour on every battle-field 
of the republic from Bunker Hill to Appomatox. 
In no other land have those of our profession so 
freely put off the advocate's gown and taken up 
the sword. When our civil war came, thousands 
of kindling youth yet in their novitiate, threw 
down their books and hurried to the front, 
generously exchanging the court for the camp, 
and the peaceful vigils of the lamp for the ruder 
vigils of the soldiers bivouac. In peril and 



220 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

privation they attested their devotion to their 
country, and many of them lie buried in 
Southern soil. Some of them returned to gain 
great distinction at the bar and on the bench, 
and hold in fee the rewards of two great 
professions. Theirs should be the three-fold 
blessing of the Great King, — "Length of days 
in their right hand and in their left, riches and 
honour." I have fancied that this dual education 
and experience has blended in them a broader 
and kindlier resultant of character than is given 
to others. Of this type of manhood was John 
Marshall. He loved books better than war 
but when the call to arms came, he left the 
scholar's retirement and ease and took his 
place with his countrymen. We give him, dead, 
the four-fold meed of praise, — as soldier, lawyer, 
statesman, and jurist; yet I am sure that, 
living, he felt that heaven could make him no 
kindlier gifts than the memories he held of 
Brandywine and Valley Forge. 

Marshall had literary leanings in his 
earlier years, not in the direction of the law. 
He cultivated the Muse of Poetry with at least 
some small result in verse. He had the example 
of the great lawyers who have occasionally 
dropped into poetry. But with him, as with 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 221 

them, it seems to have been a mere casual and 
accidental fault, — an instance of Homeric 
nodding. It is true the lawyer's license covers 
the right to borrow, and this, no doubt, can 
be interpreted to mean that he may warm his 
heart with the verses of other people, and adorn 
with vernal bloom the aridities of the law. 
Coke quaintly says of this commendable 
practice, — " Verses at the first were invented 
for the help of memrie, and it standeth well 
with the gravitie of our lawyer to cite them. " 
Chief Justice Bleckley of Georgia was sometimes 
a poet, but with him it was a mere incident of 
the strenuous life. I think he embalmed some 
verses in the amber of his opinions, in mere 
frolic, as Marshall sought relaxation from the 
cares of the bench in the game of quoits. Judge 
Cranch was a musician, but not a poet, but he 
did allow his son to write poetry. It is 
unnecessary to add that the son never achieved 
the father's fame. Judge Finch of the New 
York Court of Appeals wrote college songs, but 
this seems to have been a vice of youth. Often, 
when the bar supposed Chief Justice Gibson 
was listening, he was w r riting poetical skits, or 
drawing fancy sketches. But this was probably 
done in self defense. In early childhood Judge 



222 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Story was a poet, but he recovered from it 
along with other infantile ailments, except for 
an occasional lapse, — governed by the maxim 
de minimis non curat lex. It is related of 
Marshall that in his earlier years he wrote a 
small volume of verses, but, as his biographer 
felicitously puts it, "He exhibited in this 
matter the same rare good sense that character- 
ized him in all things, he never published it ." 
Certainly the offence was grave, yet he nobly 
redeemed himself and afterwards lived it down. 
In spite of these wayward examples from the 
lives of good men and great, it is rightly 
considered as much as a lawyer's reputation is 
worth, to be known as a poet. The law is a 
jealous mistress and makes wry faces at the 
Muse of Poetry. The lawyer must busy his 
imagination and creative talent with the nice 
sharp quilletts of his hornbooks, baking his 
brains in the swift fire of our multitudinous 
reports, even though it shall give him the 
blemish of "boiled eyes," which Dickens avers 
he found bulging from the physiognomy of the 
barristers of the Inns of Court. If the lawyer 
have the literary instinct, he may build as did 
Chitty and Cooley; he may make his briefs 
models of clear and lucid reasoning, with now 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 223 

and then a permissive jest of such rare point as 
that it will disturb the court in its daily 
slumbers. All the treasures of literature are 
his to do with what he will, and he may in the 
divine passion of forensic argument invoke all 
the poets and sages to do him tasks. He may 
seek a place on the bench, and there, with the 
aid of a» good memory to enable him not to 
overrule to-day that which he decided yesterday, 
lay up for himself better treasures than the 
toys of poesy. I cannot learn that Marshall 
ever indulged, judicially at least, in a joke. 
The nearest he ever came to it, — and it was not 
very near, was on one occasion when he was 
standing on a step-ladder in the library and fell 
to the floor under a load of books. He 
remarked, "I have laid down the law often, 
but this is the first time the law ever laid me 
down." But this was in the library, with no 
one but the librarian to witness this relaxing 
jocularity. Marshall never gave way to any 
like weakness on the bench. The nimble play 
of wit and fancy which has been the delight of 
some able jurists, was not his forte. He made 
a serious business of his judicial duties. The 
foregoing solitary example will show that he 
was thus a total abstainer, from inaptitude and 



224 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

not from choice. We cannot think that he was 
deterred by the fact that repute as a wit some- 
times detracts from the well-deserved fame of 
public men for sobriety and wisdom ; although 
it is something of a truth that dullness inspires 
confidence, while wit is feared and suspected, 
and the ability to discourse platitude and 
commonplace is the best ticket to favour with 
the mass. 

No doubt Marshall had a keen sense of 
humour, yet in court I doubt whether he would 
have bestowed more than the tribute of a wintry 
smile upon those familiar ancient jokes that are 
so loudly laughed at by their narrators. And, 
as he always remained a novice in the field of 
jocular law, so he never strayed from the 
prescribed path to indulge in primrose dalliance 
in general literature. He never adorned his 
opinions with that classical lore which adds 
variety and entertainment to the most ponder- 
ous legal learning. He wrote a life of Washington 
in five large volumes. It is a valuable work in 
some respects, yet it has suffered some at the 
hands of the critics. It was the task of love 
and respect, yet one alien to his great talents. 

He had many endearing personal qualities. 
In great men these often attract and win us 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 225 

far more than their important actions. Finer 
than Waverly, or Ivanhoe, finer than any of 
those heroic shades that people his land of 
dreams, is the noble spirit of the Wizard of the 
North, cheerfully facing adversity, and coining 
his life to pay his debts. Dante, "Holding 
heart-break at bay for twenty years, not 
allowing himself to die until his task was done, ' ' 
is greater than the Divine Comedy. Lamb, 
44 winning his way with sad and patient soul 
through evil and pain and strange calamity," 
it is more to us than the exqisite Essays of Elia. 
We love the man because he ever jested lightly 
with sorrow, and lightly broke her ashen crust, 
and because he did not wax old in the evil 
shadows of circumstance. Washington's per- 
sonality is greater than his deeds. What 
public act of Lincoln appeals to us like the 
pictures we have of that homely stooping figure 
and furrowed face, shadowed and softened by 
the vast griefs through which he had passed. 
Grant was never dearer to this people than 
when with the slow agony of death creeping 
over him, he finished his last task. It is to the 
man that we give our first and best allegiance, 
rather than to the soldier, scholar or statesman. 
It is over the primal traits in Marshall's 



226 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

character that we may wish to linger longest 
and not over the dry chronology of the ency- 
clopaedias, — those gigantic tumuli, wherein has 
been elaborately deposited the mere skeleton of 
history. Marshall's leading characteristics 
were those of true greatness, — simplicity and 
directness, with an entire absence of pretence 
or affectation. He never made it possible for 
any man to speak better of him than he 
deserved. I have learned from the veterans of 
our civil war that the crucible of the soldier's 
life tested men's metal, and speedily determined 
whether it was true gold or pinchbeck. The 
long march is cold and wet, the hunger and 
hardships of the camp where comfort was 
unknown, tried men as no other environment 
could do. The good fellow of the street or 
club, or of the social circle at home, as a soldier 
oftentimes became a whining, selfish complainer, 
shirking every kindly office that made hardship 
bearable. Marshall was thus tested and not 
found wanting. Our soldiers suffered incredible 
hardships at Valley Forge. The winter was 
very cold and the snow deep, and they were 
almost naked, and without shoes or blankets. 
Washington said of this time of trial, — "Xo 
history now extant can furnish an instance of 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 227 

an army suffering such uncommon hardships 
and bearing them with the same fortitude and 
patience." Part of the time the army was 
destitute of food. Yet there was not lacking 
some element of the grotesque to cheer their 
privations. In the history of the camp at 
Valley Forge, there are strong traces of the 
national thirst for pie which even then seems to 
have been unquenchable, and which has ever 
since given pie a dominating influence over all 
more effete refections throughout our common 
country. We read that the neighbouring 
Dutchwomen used to ride into camp seated on 
great sacks of pies, which were of such con- 
sistency, and made in such manner as that they 
could be thrown across the room, and yet suffer 
not the slightest disintegration. The historian 
says that these adamantine stratifications 
''were considered a great delicacy, and were 
much enjoyed." We cannot wonder that the 
soldiers who could enjoy these pies were able to 
endure all lesser hardships, and we can even 
understand how they might cross the Delaware 
in the midst of floating ice, and esteem it but a 
holiday pastime. One of Marshall's mess- 
mates says of his conduct at this time, — "He 
was the best tempered man I ever knew. During 



228 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

all his sufferings at Valley Forge, nothing 
discouraged, nothing disturbed him. If he 
had only bread to eat, it was just as well; if 
only meat, it made no difference. If any of the 
officers murmured at their deprivations, he 
would shame them by good natured raillery, or 
encourage them by his own exuberance of 
spirits. He was an excellent companion, and 
idolized by the soldiers and his brother officers, 
whose gloomy hours he enlivened by his inex- 
haustible fund of anecdote. " He was much 
esteemed for his fairness, and acted as deputy 
advocate, and was often chosen to arbitrate 
differences between his brother officers. He 
afterwards modestly attributed his success at 
the bar to the friendship of his soldier comrades. 
They found that republics are ungrateful, and 
looked on him as their spokesman. He never 
intrigued for political preferment, and all his 
honours came unsought and unbought. His 
associates, sometimes not too kind to him, he 
looked upon without malice or uncharity. He 
envied no man and disparaged no rival. He 
bore: 

No envy of another's fame * * * 
Nor rustling- heard in every breeze 
The laurels of Miltiades. 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 229 

Marshall was admitted to the bar in 1781 
and at once rose to eminence, first in Fauquier 
County, and thereafter at Richmond, where he 
moved. There were able lawyers at Richmond 
and Marshall soon ranked as their leader. 
Usually the young lawyer who leaps suddenly 
into prominence, does so because of some art of 
address or catch of oratory, or because he is 
apt at cultivating and winning popular favour. 
He may, withal, it is true, have more solid and 
enduring qualities, that will in any event bring 
him ultimate recognition. But it is the showier 
and more pretentious traits that many times 
furnish the best proofs of learning to the 
multitude. With these alone, the mere pre- 
tender will often pass the toiler, who may 
foolishly think that it is only hard work and 
merit that count. The smallest modicum of 
brains and learning, if accompanied by impud- 
ence and push, frequently bring more speedy 
rewards than all the toils of the midnight lamp. 
Marshall's early fame was not built upon 
these shifting sands, and he made his merit 
known by no meretricious arts. 

He was always genial and talkative enough 
for all the offices of good fellowship. He was 
no dullard, creating by reticence the seeming of 



230 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

wisdom, studiously holding his tongue that he 
might appear to hold all knowledge. He did 
not aim at that sententious dullness, at those 
continuous "brilliant flashes of silence, " which 
some men cultivate in order to give themselves 
a factitious learning and solidity. 

The biographers have generally insisted 
that Marshall's character was "unredeemed 
by a single vice, " and yet I cannot but believe 
that he had an abundance of good, honest, 
hearty, human hatred for cant, for all shams 
and humbugs. He could not have always kept 
his keen wit in sheath, when he saw financial 
magnates — and others, paying court to judges 
with green turtle and cold bottles, or with tips 
for little flyers in the field of speculation ; or 
when he saw how easy it was for judges' sons 
to have thrust into their raw apprentice hands 
the retainers of powerful corporations, or saw 
them achieving great place without effort, while 
their fellow novices of humbler birth were 
plodding in the dust, and counting with their 
heart throbs the troubled years that separated 
them from fame. Perhaps we are "to dumb 
forgetfullness a prey, " and these mysterious 
freaks of Fortune never did happen and inspire 
cynic mirth on this round globe, but in distant 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 231 

spheres, and only cognizant to us through 
vagrant dreams. If so, will she of sword and 
scales and bandaged eyes, forgive the sin. 

We who now see our nation honoured and 
respected among the nations of the earth ; 
courted and flattered by kings and diplomats, 
and any alliance with it held in high esteem ; 
its ever widening power extending from "lands 
of snow to lands of sun, " can hardly imagine 
its dependent and almost helpless condition but 
a little more than one hundred years ago. It 
lay broken and exhausted by the Revolution, 
as some spent swimmer who has battled long 
with wind and tide, and at last drags himself 
wearily upon the shore, victorious over death, 
but without strength to protect himself from 
further dangers. The war had impoverished 
the infant colonies beyond conception, and 
every evil force in society was unleashed and set 
free. The colonies were full of warring factions, 
and discord, unrest, and suspicion were rampant 
everywhere. Patrick Henry had said in a 
supreme burst of eloquence in the first 
Congress, — "The distinction between Vir- 
ginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers and 
New Englanders, is no more. I am not a 
Virginian, I am an American. " The leaven of 



232 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

this sentiment was working but it was overlaid 
and stifled by baser passions. The Congress 
of Delegates, soon after the Revolution, ceased 
to have any power for good and became merely 
an arena for recriminations and fruitless strife. 
It was often without a quorum, and when a 
quorum was present, it was impotent to make 
treaties; to raise money to meet national 
obligations, or to transact business of any kind. 
The mother country, sullen and untractable in 
defeat, lent no helping hand, but aided rather 
in embroiling us further. Her great rival, 
France, assumed that we would be her ally 
against England, because of the aid she gave 
us in the Revolution. Her representatives 
insulted our government with swelling rodomon- 
tade, asserting the adoration France had for 
freedom, and adjuring us to join France in a 
crusade against the "tyrant of the seas." 
Genet came here from France, lawlessly intent 
on using our ports as depots of supplies to 
make war on England, and when the president 
refused his sanction to these high handed 
proceedings, Genet threatened to appeal to the 
American people. The little gods who preside 
over the comedies of nations must have had 
great mirth over the grotesque vanity of France, 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 233 

yet in the non-age of freedom, thus reproaching 
a race that held cherished memories of Runny- 
mede, of Preston Pans and Marston Moor, of 
the Long Parliament, of the trial of the Seven 
Bishops, and of the death and outlawry of 
tyrant kings. 

In spite of our grateful declamation, we 
know that the aid of France was not extended 
to us in our hour of trouble, disinterestedly, or 
from pure love of freedom and human rights. 
It was upon consideration and for an antici- 
pated equivalent. To say this we need not 
detract from the fame of the immortal 
La Fayette, but the ruling powers who sent 
him here to aid us, hated freedom with the 
hatred of tyrants. They held with iron 
despotism that inheritance of tyranny under 
which France had groaned for centuries. The 
example that they helped us to give to the world 
was doubtless one cause of their own undoing. 
But a few years after our struggle was ended, 
their day of retribution came and their doom 
was written on the pages of history with bloody 
hands. In that atonement of blood the debt 
of a thousand years of despotism was but 
poorly paid. It was the leaders of that 
unlicensed mob, the legitimate successor of 



234 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

oppression, that intrigued here against 
England. They could claim no natural alliance 
with us, for Frank and Saxon never yet have 
been blood-brothers. Their seeming love for 
us was but another form of hatred for England. 
It is a curious coincidence that the love of 
France for England's enemies has always been 
exactly measured by her hatred of England. 
She was baffled in her attempt to communicate 
to us that disease of national hysteria by which 
she has been smitten since her revolution. Since 
then it has needed but little to bring on the 
worst attacks. Boulanger, the Dreyfus Case, 
or the fermenting muck of Paris, may any of 
them on occasion be sufficient excitants. When 
none of these are present in active eruption, 
there sits perfidious Albion, ruler of the waves, 
holding "dominion over palm and pine, " cooly 
surveying with good-natured contempt her 
mercurial rival ; or there is Germany, phlegmatic 
and unmoved behind her vast military equip- 
ment ; or, there is Russia, adroitly patting the 
hysterical patient on the back, setting her 
on England and always holding before her 
eyes the hope of an alliance that never comes. 
I will admit that we have slight attacks of 
hysteria at regularly recurring intervals, but we 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 235 

have the commingled blood of Latin, Saxon 
and Teuton, to keep the balance true. Ours 
comes every four years, and when the fit is on 
us I expect that my neighbours will call me 
an anarchist, a traitor, or a plutocrat. But this 
reviling is done in a Pickwickian sense, and as 
a necessary part of the game of politics. When 
the kindergarten madness effervesces, we jog 
along very comfortably together. After Citizen 
Genet had been driven out, a state of war 
between this country and France, practically 
existed. Although at first there was a con- 
siderable French party here, indignation grew 
apace under the repeated insults of France, and 
preparations for war were made. Reprisals on 
French shipping were ordered and Washington 
was made commander-in-chief. Finally, in the 
interests of peace a special commission of three 
eminent men was appointed to go to France,. 
Marshall was one of the members of this 
commission. It was insultingly received in 
France and it is a matter of history that 
Talleyrand approached the commissioners for a 
bribe, They finally left France in bitter 
indignation. The lines of the poet, — 
Talk not of freedom to the Franks, 
They have a king who buys and sells. 



236 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

might have been written for the admonition of 
the commissioners. The trouble with France 
was finally compromised and war averted, but 
it left with us bitter distrust that gratitude 
could not wholly cure, and also left a luxuriant 
crop of claims arising out of the spoliation of 
our commerce by France. Many of these are 
still rotting in mildewed ease in our Court of 
Claims, a rich blessing for our profession, and 
a painful legacy for the posterity of the original 
claimants, even to the tenth generation. By 
skillful nursing, they had assumed alderraanic 
proportions, and a venerable dignity, when the 
southern mule and cotton bale of loyal parentage 
and ownership, were yet babes in the arms of 
the lawyers. Let us hope that together they 
will continue to infest the watches of the moon 
and gladden the hearts of our professional 
successors for many generations. 

On his return to this country, MARSHALL 
was received with acclamations. He was given 
a public dinner by both houses of Congress, 
"asan evidence of affection for his person, and 
of their grateful approbation of the patriotic 
firmness with which he had sustained the 
dignity of his country during his important 
mission. " In 1798 he was offered the position 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 237 

of associate justice of the Supreme Court, but 
declined it, his chief reason for so doing being 
that he had just been nominated for Congress. 
He was elected, but resigned his seat to accept 
a position in the cabinet of President Adams. 
On January 31, 1801, he was appointed Chief 
Justice of the Supreme Court, which position 
he held until his death, July 6, 1835. I will 
not dwell upon the full chronology of the 
honours that were bestowed upon him ; they 
are known to every school-boy. Whether the 
place he filled was great or small in the 
estimation of men, he made it great by the 
strength of his personality. 

There were strong rivalries among the 
public men of Marshall's day. He and 
Jefferson were never at harmony, although 
Jefferson was the more critical and censorious 
of the two. In his way he was as great as 
Marshall, yet with some minor weaknesses of 
character, not apparent in Marshall. As 
the author of the Declaration of Independence, 
and in the part he played in the drama of the 
Revolution and in the reconstruction period 
following it, he was second only to the great 
Washington, in the estimation of the people. 
He was bold and daring in his views, and more 



238 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

far-sighted than any of his associates except 
Hamilton. He had the paradoxical personality 
of a democratic aristocrat. In social position 
he was a Virginia country gentleman, with 
every inducement to respect his class and uphold 
its privileges. Yet he was always in rebellion 
against this class, and manifested a passionate 
love of the people and a pure democracy from 
which every trace of fuedalism and patrician 
privilege should be eliminated. In Virginia, he 
proposed measures for the disestablishment of 
the church and for complete religious freedom, 
and abolishing the laws of entail and primo- 
geniture. Himself a slaveholder, he hated 
slavery as an aristocratic institution, and he 
advocated a bill forbidding the importation of 
slaves into Virginia. When Congress was 
legislating for the Northwest Territory, he 
framed a clause interdicting slavery in this 
territory after the year 1800, in almost the exact 
language of our Thirteenth Amendment. His 
theories were almost diametrically opposed to 
those of his great rival Hamilton. The cleavage 
line between them became strongly marked 
when they were together in Washington's 
cabinet. From that time on party alignment was 
that of Federalist and Democrat; of States 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 239 

Rights and Centralized Government. Jefferson 
believed ardently in the people; Hamilton had 
a certain distrust of popular government, 
founded on the belief that it would never realize 
the anticipations of its advocates, and would of 
necessity have many defects and weaknesses. 
He believed in a strong national government, 
with power to enforce all measures for its well- 
being, even against the will of the states. 
Jefferson believed in States Rights so called. 
Practically, he proved that he was ready to go 
far in opposition to his own theories. Jefferson 
and his following believed that the Hamiltonian 
view would lead to the destruction of the rights 
of the states. Washington seemed to occupy 
middle ground between these two opposing 
schools, with an inclination towards the 
Federalist side. As soon as peace came, he saw 
that the confederation had no governmental 
power. He spoke of the contempt that would 
would be felt for us abroad, when it was seen 
that the states were sovereigns or not as best 
suited their purposes; "in a word, that we 
were one nation to-day, and thirteen to- 



morrow." 



Marshall held to this opinion, and no 
doubt much of his labour thereafter in 



240 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

construing the powers of the national govern- 
ment, was inspired by his experience and 
observation of this period of weakness and 
imbecility. The states were jealous of each 
other and jealous of any government they 
might jointly establish. MARSHALL was really 
a conservative Federalist, more of a Democrat 
than Washington, not so much of a Democrat 
as Jefferson. While Washington lived, Hamilton 
moulded the new government his way. Jefferson 
was the greater of the two in his ability to win 
and hold the people. He harmonized himself 
with them, and was always ready to go with 
them a little, in order to induce them to go with 
him as far as he wished. He followed, in order 
that he might lead. Out of power he was a 
radical, the terror of those who believed in the 
established order; in power he was a careful 
and prudent conservative, acting in the main 
wisely and justly. He presents in this, not the 
only instance in history of the sobering influence 
of power and responsibility upon the radical, 
who before was a volcano of fierce and startling 
declamation. When he became president he 
speedily recovered from his fear of the dangers 
of a strong government. In some ways he 
seemed to have had a marvelous foresight. He 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 241 

sent the Louis and Clark expedition to explore 
the territory northwest of the Louisiana 
Purchase, in 1804, and thus laid the foundation 
for our claims to the country on the Columbia 
River. He saw at least some of the potentialities 
of the Louisiana Purchase, and closed the 
bargain for it with the First Consul, hurriedly 
and secretly. This was an act of daring 
statesmanship that collided directly with the 
States Rights doctrine as to the limited powers 
of the Federal Government. It is doubtful 
whether Hamilton, in Jefferson's place would 
have dared to go as far, for it was thought to 
be an exercise of power outside of the constitu- 
tion. Jefferson could so act, because he knew 
his own power with the people and that he 
could justify his course to them. As to this 
and other measures, long before his administra- 
tion closed, we find Jefferson sitting in the seat 
of the Federalist and not afraid. It is said that 
he inspired the Kentucky and Virginia 
Resolutions, which declared the extreme doctrine 
of States Rights, yet during his administration, 
he was so busy building up the powers of 
government that he overlooked them. At the 
same time he was criticising Marshall severely 
for the Federalistic trend of his decisions. The 



242 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

discredit attached to the Alien and Sedition 
Laws, and the success of Jefferson's administra- 
tion, caused the slow disappearance of the 
Federalist party. Its existence was in a 
measure useless for its work was being done by 
the Democratic Party. But the ghostly 
Cassandra of States Rights would not down. 
It croaked balefully, first with one party and 
then with the other. Of all propagandas, it 
has been the most mercenary and changeable. 
Now it turns up in New England, now in 
Pennsylvania, now in South Carolina, and then 
again in highly virtuous Wisconsin. It presided 
at the birth of the Kentucky and Virginia 
Resolutions; it was the leading spirit of the 
Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania; it shrieked 
with the New England Federalists, in the days 
of the Hartford Convention when Massachusetts 
was seriously contemplating seceding from the 
Union ; it defied Jackson in South Carolina, 
and inspired the nullification of the Fugitive 
Slave Law in Wisconsin. Democrat, Federalist, 
Republican and Whig, — the advocate of States 
Rights and the advocate of a strong national 
government, have alternated, and veered and 
shifted, and stolen each others' places, and 
have kept countenance through it all with 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 243 

marvelous effrontery. Sometimes this magnil- 
oquent phrase played comedy, sometimes 
tragedy. The last act of comedy that we need 
consider here, is Jackson issuing his proclama- 
tion against the nullifiers of South Carolina, 
and threatening to hang them if they persisted 
in their course, and being complimented therefor 
by all the old Federalists, who had thus seen 
the fullness of national salvation. 

Disraeli said of the wars and hatreds of 
nations, "All is race." So in the world of 
politics, all is phrase. In the Kingdom of 
Fools, the phrase-monger is the chief potentate, 
and the world of politics being the main 
province of this kingdom, the fools who infest 
it aver that all wisdom and righteousness is 
vested in the twaddle of a phrase. Thus 
presidents are made and unmade by a shibboleth 
of empty words. States Rights was for long 
a strutting phrase, the pet of politicians, and 
the god of both fools and knaves for three 
quarters of a century; yet always like a tale 
told by an idiot, "full of sound and fury, 
signifying, — nothing. " As a toy to charm the 
people it was reasonably harmless at first. 
Finally it became linked with the slave-power 
in hideous brotherhood of crime and shame, 



244 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

and they died together, leaving as mute 
witnesses to the power of a phrase, a million 
graves. These things are suggested in passing ; 
they help to enflesh the dry bones of history, 
and to quicken them with life. Much of this 
history proves how rare and precious and how 
remote from mortal ken is the jewel of 
consistency; like the Holy Grail of Knight 
Errantry, that none might secure save the 
pure in heart. 

Through the turbulent unrest of this early 
time, Marshall toiled, building and strength- 
ening the edifice of constitutional law. We 
cannot look back to one of his decisions 
construing the powers of the states or of the 
national government, and wish that it had 
been different. He was a son of Virginia, the 
slave-holding home of States Rights, vet his 
construction of the constitution forged for us 
the mightiest weapons with which to free the 
slaves, and to smite into cureless ruin the 
doctrine that a state might dissolve the Union. 
He went upon the bench at a time when the 
right of the courts to nullify laws because of 
their unconstitutionality, was but reluctantly 
conceded. He was not the pioneer of this view, 
although he became its most eminent champion. 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 245 

In 1786, in Rhode Island, the court held an act 
of the legislature void for this reason. For 
this the judges were impeached, but were not 
removed, although the legislature, refusing to 
re-elect them, put more pliant judges in their 
places. In 1803, in Ohio, a statute was held 
unconstitutional, and this led to the impeach- 
ment of the judges, but they were acquitted. 
In 1795, in Pennsylyania, in the United States 
Court, a statute which attempted to divest one 
man of his property and give it to another, was 
held unconstitutional. In 1798, in the same 
state, it was held that a law, contrary to the 
first principles of the social compact, was void, 
as not being a rightful exercise of the legislative 
power. This broad principle has been 
sanctioned by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, 
in Durkee vs. Janesville, 28 Wisconsin 464. 
Marbury vs. Madison was the first case in 
which Marshall refers to this power in the 
judiciary as an established rule. Thereafter he 
supported it with all the ardour and strength 
of his great genius. It has been the priceless 
adjunct of free government, the mighty shield 
of the rights and liberties of the citizen. It has 
been many times invoked to save him from 
illegal punishment, to save his property from 



246 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

the greed of unscrupulous enemies, and to save 
his political rights from the unbridled license of 
victorious political opponents controlling legisla- 
tive bodies. Nor does it now sleep, except as a 
sword, dedicated to a righteous cause, sleeps in 
its scabbard. We had never more need of it. 
The shop-keeper of petty instinct who desires 
to crush out business rivals or to keep non- 
resident competitors out of the state; the 
producer who seeks to make a market for his 
own wares by taxing a rival commodity out of 
existence; the suitor who tries his cause in the 
legislature, in order that he may secure there 
that which the courts cannot in justice give 
him, — and all unworthy covetors of their 
neighbour's lands or goods, are now, as ever, 
shameless constituents of our social structure, 
calling for the constant vigilance of the courts 
in the protection of constitutional rights. Xor 
have we yet reached the perfection of constitu- 
tional government. We cannot attain it until 
w r e have cut down the Upas Tree of Privilege 
to the very roots and have torn the roots from 
out the soil. It is an alien growth, our legacy 
from the Dark Ages ; hoary and venerable with 
years, sanctioned by custom and tradition, its 
worst excesses elevated by its worshippers into 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 247 

religious rites; watered and nurtured by the 
perennial greed and selfishness of man; out- 
lasting all other change, and all other 
governmental tyranny, and escaping by 
unfortunate mischance to this day the Ithuriel 
spear of Freedom. We need additional 
constitutional guaranties that will give to every 
citizen the right to prevent by appropriate 
remedy legislative grants of gifts and bonuses 
out of public moneys to private business 
enterprises, and to prevent the gifts of public 
franchises that are the property of the whole 
people. Until we have thus perfected free 
institutions, we may well feel the shame of the 
prophet, of whom it is said, — "And he went a 
day's journey into the wilderness, and sat 
himself down under a juniper tree; and he 
said, — Now O Lord, take away my life, for I 
am not better than my fathers. " 

This anniversary of honor will fix our 
attention anew on those fundamental principles 
upon which free and equal government must 
rest. The opinion of the bar will go far to 
secure such new guaranties of the rights of the 
citizen; and such new limitations on the power of 
those who band together to use government 
for their own selfish ends, as may be necessary. 



248 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

Tyranny has ever a new face. It now 
gains by guile and stealth what it once seized 
brutally and with the strong hand. Every 
score of years we need a new Runnymede, 
where we may beard our captains of Privilege, 
and wrest from them a new charter of rights. 
I have no fear of the conventional anarchists. 
Free speech is the best cure for their activities, 
as it is the best safety valve for the escape and 
dissipation of all the humors in the body politic. 
But for the greater anarchists who sit enthroned 
in high places and purchase legislatures and 
municipal officers, and who are insidiously 
subverting our liberties, and filching from our 
pockets, what is not theirs, we need all our 
vigilance. Freedom and equality have a deeper 
meaning than the frothy interpretations of our 
professional flag- wavers, — especially such of 
them as wave the old flag with one hand, and 
reach for the public treasury with the other. 
Unjust laws which unjustly and unequally 
distribute the wealth, earned by the toil of our 
people are not a part of the inheritance received 
by us from the fathers of the republic. They 
are of the bastard, changeling brood of 
Oppression. Our real greatness lies not in the 
vast bulk of our swollen census reports, where 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 249 

we keep the toll of our aggregate wealth, for 
the debit side of the account will show that 
through legislation born of greed, a few have 
gained more than thrift and industry can 
rightfully give them. 

Of what avail the plow or sail, 
Or land or life if freedom fail? 
But recently new responsibilities have come 
to us that must be met wisely and justly. They 
call for the talent of the statesman, not of the 
politician. I do not assume to make a standard 
of conscience for others, but only to be a poor 
keeper of my own, yet from the beginning of 
the war in the Phillipines, I have been one of 
those of an opposite political faith to the 
president, who have felt that it was our duty 
to uphold the administration in carrying on 
this war. For our country is nearer to us than 
our politics; its flag is ours, its battles and its 
honour are ours, no matter who may live in the 
White House, or who may hold prate and 
debate in our two houses of palaver. So we 
have felt that our armies must put down armed 
resistance to our authority, at whatever cost in 
blood and treasure. As Americans we should 
stultify ourselves by allowing any political 
convention, or any partisan considerations to 



250 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

swerve us from this course. When our fellow 
citizens return from fighting our battles, they 
cannot shame us with the bitter reproach that 
we fired at them from the rear. Under the 
inspirations of our mighty theme, I have 
thought best to refer to some of the weighty 
problems that are pressing upon us. — the 
weightiest that we have met since the slave- 
power went down in battle thunder and flame. 
Whether it was wise to take our island 
possessions, depends upon how wisely we 
execute our trust towards the simple and 
dependent peoples who have confided in our 
integrity. Shall we generously share with 
them our destiny, or shall we only allow them 
to come to our father's house as step-children 
and poor relations? Shall we keep them in the 
vestibule of the temple of liberty, while we 
gather close to the altar? We have placed our 
own fundamental rights in the constitution, 
where no chance or change can destroy them ; 
shall theirs be as highly placed, or shall they 
be cast out on the shifting cnrrent of our 
politics, to be the sport and mock of the time, 
mere bondmen of the fickle grace and favour of 
our changing political dynasties? If American 
manhood still remain clothed in its full nobility 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 251 

it will assuredly not bestow the rights of freedom 
with miser care on these wards of our 
civilization. An ex-president in a near-by state, 
who has proved that an ex-president may be a 
statesmen, and not a mere oracle of common- 
place, says of this matter, — "It has been said 
that the flash of Dewey's guns in Manila Bay, 
revealed to the American people a new mission. 
I like to think of them as revealing the same 
old mission that w 7 e read in the flash of 
Washington's guns at Yorktown. God forbid 
that the day should ever come, when in the 
American mind the thought of man as a 
'consumer, ' shall submerge the old American 
thought of man as a creature of God, endowed 
with ' u nalienable rights. ' ' ' 

This observance will surely lead us to a 
greater respect for fundamental rights. 
Marshall watched beside constitutional 
government on this continent in its very cradle- 
time. It is not too much to say, that because 
of his fostering care, it has defied the mutations 
of Time, the struggles of a nation in arms, and 
all the storms of war and peace, until now in 
its mid-noon splendour, it is an example to 
the whole earth. Those who fear for the 
perpetuity of American institutions, if they 



252 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

will read well our history need not be 
dismayed over the dangers that lurk along our 
pathway. The rocking pine that has stood 
before the whirlwind, does not fall prostrate 
before the summer breeze. If the Union could 
grow out of the warring elements of the 
Colonial Confederation ; if it could survive the 
evil days that followed its establishment, when 
its enemies were straining its untried strength; 
if it could acquire and absorb peacefully the 
vast territory west of the Mississippi ; if it could 
endure through the hell of human slavery, and 
through the dreadful war that made our land 
one great charnel house, and finally spring 
stronger and wiser from the shock and 
dismemberment of that war, it surely cannot 
come to wreck because of this or that policy of 
protection or free trade or finance, or, because 
we may grasp, even though unwisely, new lands 
beyond our ocean boundaries. Having endured 
so much it surely can endure little. It has 
firmly withstood both foreign and domestic 
war and the machinations of bitter and powerful 
enemies both at home and abroad; it cannot 
be that any pigmy peril will shatter it. It has 
lived through the valley and the shadow of 
death; it stands now in the open, in 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 253 

unshadowed dignity and power, where every 
wind of heaven brings it favour. So I would 
say, let us be not afraid. For us who believe 
in and trust the American people, the trifling 
contentions of heated political campaigns light 
no danger signals that we can regard. These 
things are but for a day; our destiny lies with 
the centuries. We have always with us the 
great covenant of our faith, and through storm 
and confusion, the wisdom of JOHN MARSHALL 
shines forth like the light-house beacon that 
guards the seas. Let it be our mission to see 
that no cunning hand shall undo his work, and 
that no pretence of expediency and no clamour 
of the opportunist, shall be allowed to wring a 
paltering decision from our highest tribunal 
and thus loosen the bonds of our respect for it. 
The argument of policy and expediency never 
weighed with him ; let us also be deaf to such 
ignoble considerations. For over thirty years 
he expounded with jealous fidelity the charter 
of our rights; let us expound it with like fidelity 
through our span of years. If we as lawyers 
shall refuse to take our convictions ready-made 
from party platforms ; if we shall remain 
unmoved in the midst of party faction, holding 
fast to the unchanging verities that were so 



254 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

dear to him ; if we shall refuse to yield servile 
approval to judicial decisions inspired by 
prejudice or popular clamour, or rendered at 
infamous political behest, or upon careless or 
insufficient consideration, but fearlessly maintain 
that independence which is the grandest 
tradition of the bar, then indeed shall we be 
worthy pupils of the great pioneer jurist whose 
life work is our priceless inheritance. 

And now the grateful task which you have 
so kindly and generously given me, is finished. 
The thronging inspirations of this work and of 
this hour, will not soon depart from me. I feel 
still that moving awe and veneration which 
must accompany him who walks where heroes 
sleep. It has been a dear and valued privilege 
for me to add my portion to the great sura of 
eulogy, which this day brings to the memory of 
John Marshall. His, was the rounded and 
perfect life, of more than Roman virtue and 
manhood; his, the reward, richer than that 
bestowed upon great kings who sleep at 
Westminster. Divine Providence generously 
gave him a greater length of years than that 
usually alotted to man, that his work might be 
well done. Upon his grave at Richmond we 
place as great a tribute as affectionate 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 255 

remembrance ever paid to man. As was said 
of New England's greatest son, so we may say 
of Marshall : 

In toil he lived, in peace he died, 
When life's full cycle was complete, 
Put off his robes of power and pride 
And laid them at his Master's feet. 



NOTE 

Among the comments made since the 
publication of the first edition of this book, 
there are portions of two letters which may be 
of interest to the reader. 

Mr. George R. Peck of Chicago says : 

* * * One of tbe finest essays in the 
book, in my judgment, is the one on 
"Americanism." It is a fitting- rebuke to 
those who suppose that our literary diet 
should be entirely American. * * * 

But I cannot forgive you for the 
contemptous way in which you speak of "The 
Man Without a Country." I believe it to be 
absolutely classic, — a little classic of course, 
but yet a classic that will be read a thousand 
years from now. It is of no consequence 
that Aaron Burr, who lured poor Philip 
Nolan into his troubles, escaped punishment. 
Burr was tried by the civil courts, while 
Nolan, of course a purely fictitious 
character, was tried under the harsher 

256 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 257 

procedure of a military court. It is an 
unreasonable story, but not more unreason- 
able than all the great stories that have 
charmed the world. It is pure fiction, but in 
my judgment the noblest short story ever 
written. I remember the first time I read it 
as I lay in the trenches in front of the enemy, 
and how I then resolved to stand by the 
United States forevermore. I believe it was 
worth a hundred regiments to the Union 
cause. It was a lesson to the young soldiers 
who were carrying the flag, and made them 
understand the miserable condition of a man 
who could be so unfortunate as to have no 
country. 

But I do not rest my opinion solely on 
the patriotic lesson inculcated. As a piece of 
pure literature, of mere art, 1 think it without 
an equal among short stories. It has always 
seemed to me that some sort of inspiration 
must have dropped into the heart of Edward 
Everett Hale when he wrote it. You may 
think this extravagant language, but you 
must admit that your own condemnation of 
the story is quite as much so. It is not a 
question whether Philip Nolan's sentence 
was too severe. I should be likely to agree 



258 CRITICAL CONFESSIONS 

with you as to that. But the question is 
whether it is not a fine piece of literary work, 
of artistic work, of such work as only once 
or twice in a generation is done by any author. 

I am not much given to hysterics. I have 
read "The Man Without a Country" perhaps 
a hundred times, and I have never read it 
without tears, Can it be that a story w T hich 
can produce such an effect, is only interesting 
and instructive for fifteen-year-olds? 

I have said this about "The Man Without 
a Country" because you and I are friends, 
and have a right to differ. There is hardly 
a thing- in your volume to which I could not 
subscribe, except what you said about "The 
Man Without a Country, " and I cannot give 
you my views without frankly saying- that I 
do not think you are partly wrong-, but 
absolutely and entirely so. 

Mr. Andrew Lang says: 

As to Captain Smith; I am sorry that as 
far as his Pocahontas story g-oes, I fear that 
the critics are rig-ht who think that he 
romanced. I think I have written on the 
matter, perhaps in the preface of the new 
edition of my "Myth, Ritual and Religion," 
and I have read American criticisms to that 



JOHN MARSHALL AND HIS TIMES 259 

effect. However, he is amusing whether he 
is inventive or not. I never read the story 
of Tennyson and the £300 before. But even 
if it is true, it was only his fun and chaff, 
uttered in the presence of some dull ass, who 
repeated without understanding it. 



JAN 16 1903 



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